Fifteen years after the golden moment of discovery, six years after being feted in Stockholm, James Watson gave the world another first. His account of how he and Francis Crick solved the structure of DNA is a scientific memoir unique in style and impact.

Is it a good book? Well, yes. Watson's ostensibly warts-and-all portrayal of his days in the Cavendish laboratory in Cambridge was pieced together from letters home, and successfully evokes a brash young American's initiation into English life. A striking nostalgia pervades the book, for the intellectual excitement of working with Crick, but also for a Cambridge of tea-rooms, sunlit tennis courts, and ever-elusive au pairs.

There was always time to talk, or to go to another party.

Watson has been an Anglophile ever since, and this is undoubtedly overdone. Crick certainly thought so. One of his several complaints about the book was that it neglected the fact that the two of them worked extremely hard on technical aspects of the problem. But it is still beguiling for many readers.

More serious is Crick's other complaint – that Watson's framing of the search for the DNA structure as a race, and one which promised Nobel glory, was basically made up. The English half of the duo says he simply never thought about it like that. Nevertheless, this is the version of the story which most people know, helped by the BBC film of the book, Life Story, in the 1980s.

Life Story was a little kinder to fellow DNA-researcher Rosalind Franklin than 'The Double Helix', although scarcely more accurate, and Watson's treatment of 'Rosy' remains the most controversial feature of the book.

A rather cloying afterword pays tribute to the King's College researcher's acumen. But in the main narrative she appears in caricature as a combination of blue-stocking and harridan, and this seems to legitimise Watson's notorious appropriation of her X-ray diffraction results.

But few others of the book's cast of characters fare very well. The other King's College worker, Maurice Wilkins, told historian Horace Judson some years later that the book basically says: "I'm Jim, I'm smart. Most of the time Francis is smart too. The rest are bloody clots." Not quite true, but a measure of the offence given, and taken, at the time.

Today, the book reads as bit of a period piece, both because the Cambridge of 1953 is so much more distant, and because it puts things in ways which even someone with as little care for political correctness as Jim Watson might now reconsider. The contemporary reader may conclude that it is an artful recreation of the perceptions of a much younger, and crasser, Jim Watson, or merely that Watson is crass, period.

Besides pondering that interesting if not terrifically important question, there's another reason to pick up 'The Double Helix' today, though. It may be a piece of mythologising, its talk of races and prizes, its prescription for personal and intellectual ruthlessness in pursuit of solving urgent problems exaggerated. But it may also be how several generations of readers with no access to real laboratories now believe science actually gets done!

Book details

Paperback 208 pages (January 1999)
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Language: English
ISBN: 0140268774