ROBERT K. MERTON history of science indelibly records 1953 as the year in which the structure of the DNA molecule was discovered. But it is 1968 that will probably emerge as the year of the double helix in the history that treats the behavior of scientists, for James Watson's deeply personal account of that discovery, now in its ninth printing, has evidently seized the public imagination. Widely and diversely reviewed in journals of science and para-science, it has been discussed in scores of monthlies, weeklies and daily newspapers, from the London Times to the Erie, Pennsylvania, Times, from the Village Voice to the Wall Street Journal (which, aptly enough, manages to give a faintly financial slant to the book, concluding that" Watson, in the long run, may have done science a favor. In these days when the public is asked to allocate billions for scientific research, it's of some comfort to know that the spenders are human."). To judge from the popular reviews, that indeed was taken to be the essential message of the book: scientists are human, after all. This phrasing, it turns out, does not mean that scientists can be assigned at long last to the species Homo sapiens. Many Amer-icans and some Englishmen were apparently prepared to entertain that serviceable hypothesis even before the appearance of The Double Helix. Evidently, what is meant by the Watson-induced thought that scientists too are human is that scientists are all too human; that, in the succinct jaundiced words of the St. Louis Post-