Customer Reviews

Genes, Girls, and Gamow: After the Double Helix

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The Double Helix is a classic (even if it was a rather hyped up embellishment of the way it was), but this is nowhere near it in quality. One suspects that any publisher would have leapt at a chance to publish JDWs "next" book, after all the Double Helix must have made everyone concerned rich. Big mistake - poor Knopf. This is a rather bizarre book really - mainly all rather painful accounts of JDWs awkward contacts with girls and superficial accounts of various interactions with often famous scientists. The narrative thread is completely aimless and, frankly, rather boring. Never really do you get a real feel of what it was actually JDW and his colleagues were doing day to day to earn their salaries. There are also some somewhat awkward moments when JDW tries to make up for criticisms of the Double Helix (being nice about Rosalind Franklin and saying it was not him who coined the phrase "I have never seen Francis Crick in a modest mood" and so on). The book meanders through the middle fifties until JDW gets his job at Harvard (quite why anyone would give him a job is rather beyond the reader to understand when reading about his endless perigrinations), but I think we can say that Watson has a lot more to give than this book indicates. Completely unlike Francois Jacob's account of his life this book gives very little away about the author's inner life. His love for Christa Mayr is all rather embarrassing and very sophomoric. It makes you almost feel more sorry for her. The book does not even finish well. It just fizzles out. A final chapter of postcript catches up to the late sixties.

I am very interested in this material, but this is a poor book by anyone's standards. I am not really blaming Watson. Knopf published the book and they were foolish enough to do so. It is all rather a shame as JDW is a seminal figure and the book perhaps could have been another tour de force.

I was a research fellow in CalTech's Kerckhoff Laboratories of Biology when Jim Watson arrived in the autumn of 1953 to join us as a research fellow. Everyone was curious about the person who had come from nowhere to make, along with Francis Crick, one of the great discoveries of the twentieth century. I found him to be very bright, friendly, and bubbling with ideas. Genes, Girls, and Gamow describes the ferment in biology at that time, and his attempts to apply intuition to the problem of how information in DNA translates into proteins. But much of the book is a candid account of his search for the perfect girl to marry. We go through his attempts to woo a string of CalTech girls - all failures. I once suggested to a pretty, intelligent lab assistant that he would be a good catch, since he was sure to get a Nobel prize. She gave me a look that would have frozen melted steel, so I kept silent after that. The account of his pursuit of undergraduate student Christa Mayr is almost painful to read, since he loves her, but she is only lukewarm. It all comes out well, however, when he finally finds the girl of his deams. The third part of the book's title, the physicist George Gamow, flits in and out of the story in the same way that he would appear at CalTech and then disappear. The book reminds me a bit of The Diary of Samuel Pepys, since we read where Watson went, with whom, and what they discussed. If you would like to read an insider story of the way that much of our current biology developed explosively in the 1950's, this story gives you a month by month diary. Jim Watson's candor makes it fascinating reading.

James D. Watson produced a delightful and frequently hilarious book, _The Double Helix_, his 1968 account of how he and Francis Crick and their fellow researchers managed to jimmy molecular models into just the right positions to reveal the structure of the huge molecule DNA. It was one of the greatest discoveries science had ever made, announced in 1953 and gaining the Nobel Prize in 1962. Watson's book wonderfully well recounts the race to get the structure down, and it was a classic scientific memoir exciting enough to make it a best seller. Watson was only 25 years old when DNA was cracked, and besides biochemistry, he had other things on his mind. Girls. Thus he has produced _Genes, Girls, and Gamow: After the Double Helix_ (Knopf) to tell what happened to him after his epochal success. "I felt the need to have more than the double helix below my belt before winning the prize. I did not want to be overpraised for what was not very difficult science." That sort of modesty pervades his book.

Although genes get the first mention in the title, and there is plenty of science here, the chief part of the memoir is devoted to "girls," always on Watson's mind. It is amusing that a scientist who will be remembered forever for his monumental discovery often sounds like a confused loveless teenager seeking female solace. He frets when a girlfriend doesn't write, for instance, and stumbles in sexual endeavors. The final part of the title refers to George Gamow, an amazing physicist who pops up all over American science in the forties and fifties. His heavy drinking ("his idea of a tall drink was a tall glass completely filled with whiskey") and uproarious pranks made him disliked by many in the staid science world, but Watson reflects, "His role was to have a good time no matter the consequences to the ethos of science." Pranks were not only Gamow's stock in trade; the book is surprisingly full of them, perpetuated sometimes in official journals, sometimes by Watson, sometimes against Watson. He writes about the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute, "I deeply offended several old-timers by giving lectures in unlaced tennis shoes and wearing my floppy hat at night as well as during the day. My water pistol was also judged inappropriate, even though I generally restricted its aim to a pretty girl from the South taking invertebrate lab work too seriously."

It is great fun to see giants of science, like Feynman, Crick, and Delbruck, wander through these pages, usually in informal style. It is also interesting to see the international nature of serious scientific effort, with competition that is generally friendly. Watson is a breezy writer; the events described here, especially the details of his personal life, have none of the importance of the discovery of the double helix, and his amused and tolerant attitude comes forth on each page. It is a fond look back at a happy, busy life.

Anyone expecting a stoic recollection of the works of a great scientist will find many such books available.This is not one of them. It is, however, a very real self-portait of a man in his latter years who, while being a great scientist, admits to not being a great 'everything'. It makes the legend human, just as the anecdotes about his peers makes them less stone gods of science, and more multi-dimensional people. 'Genes, Girls, and Gamow' is the kind of book you might hear orally from the author in his den in a comfortable leather chair.It is definitly not lab coat and sterile conditions reading. If you want a genetics text, BUY a genetics text. If you want a good example of how great insight in an art or science does not make one immune from the human condition, then give this book a read.

Normally I wouldn't take the time to add to a chorus of negative reviews, but this book was a doozy. The contrast between the author's reputation and what he reveals about himself is breathtaking.

The best part of this book: seeing how so many brilliant people wandered into so many dead ends while trying to figure out the structure of RNA and the genetic code in the 1950s. This is much more interesting than the usual presentation of scientific discoveries as faits accomplis.

Many physicists were drawn into this quest, including Richard Feynman. But it was the intuitions of (ex-physicist) Francis Crick that were right on the money, including his predictions of "RNA adaptors" much like transfer RNA, and of a triplet code with multiple reading frames (with S. Brenner). And unlike Watson and many others, he hadn't even been working on the problem full-time.

You do need to know at least a little about virology and molecular biology to enjoy this aspect of the book, because the text leaves a lot unexplained. So one wonders whom Watson intended as an audience - if he was thinking about his audience at all.

Watson certainly does think a great deal about, and of, himself. In his prologue he describes a 1986 visit to his old Cambridge office, where he found a grad student "who had no idea who I was ... The manners that Cambridge so long ago instilled in me did not let me reveal my identity." Later, describing a 1956 trip to Israel, he mentions his "relief" at "finding hosts who knew who I was."

His self-infatuation informs the "girls" aspect of the book too. Watson doesn't only kiss and tell, he holds hands and tells, hugs and tells, exchanges long meaningful glances with wives of friends and tells, and guides "once-ripe" mothers of friends on the dance floor and tells. He freights the slightest incidents with unspoken meaning -- but ultimately comes across like the virginal Eric Idle character in the "Nudge, nudge" Monty Python routine. Thankfully, we never hear if he ever made it to second base or beyond.

How could he recall all this 50 years later? According to the introduction, his former heartthrob, Christa Mayr Menzel, gave him access to 60 letters he'd sent her during this period. (He started pursuing her when she was a 17-year-old high school senior, and he was a Ph.D. of 25 or so.) But if his letters really detailed every time he walked on the beach with some other girl after a drunken party before a chaste good-night, it's no wonder Ms. Mayr grew cold to him. Watson thinks it appropriate to include reproductions of two banal postcards from her (one of which is signed "love, Christa", as if he has something to prove to us), plus the text of the whining letter he wrote to her father after she dumped him.

By the book's epilogue it becomes clear that even after his Nobel Prize, Watson pursued only women who worked in his lab or were undergraduates. The water pistol comment quoted by a reviewer below leads one to suspect that they were nonetheless more mature than he.

The "happy ending" is his marriage to a Radcliffe sophomore less than half his age, a few days before his 40th birthday. His celebratory postcard to a Harvard colleague, "19 year old now mine," is creepy and chilling. Watson claims this has been a happy and durable union, and there's no grudging him that. But one wishes he'd kept some aspects of his life known only to his intimate circle, instead of sharing them with the unsuspecting reader.

Or, "How Come Brainy Guys Can't Get Laid?"

This is an amazing glimpse into the intellectual environment that nutured the truly revolutionary insite Watson and Crick achieved. It was perfect for a guy like Watson, except there weren't enough girls. Yes, if you still think Nobel Laureates are all noble, this book will help break you of that impression. You have to give the guy points for candidness. I don't know anybody else who has put so many failed conquests into print. And then the transition from lonely hunter to husband happens in the blink of an eye. So don't blink. The narrative sometimes reads like a Day Timer - you get the who, what, where. Dry. So, if you want to leave your scientists on a pedastal, leave this book on the shelf. If you are intrigued with finding out what it was like back then, you could give this one a spin.

Watson's second book centres on the quest for the structure of RNA, whereas his first one 'The double Helix' told us the story of the discovery of the DNA helix.

Readers of this work should have a solid knowledge of chemistry.
It is however not as interesting as his first book and seems to have been written more as a memory for the insiders than for the common reader.
It contains some indiscretions about Watson's more casual sexual encounters, together with his arduous search for a 'good' wife. But mainly, it's gossip about the scientific communities in England and the US in the 1950-1970's.

All in all, it doesn't have the scientific and sexual fireworks of e.g., Erwin Schrödinger's biography by Walter Moore.

Only for the friends and the aficionados.

If ever one wanted a refereshing reminder of the difference between a creator's ideas and a creator's personality, this is it. This is frankly a trainwreck of a book where a 72-year old man reminisces over all the girls he might have gone out with, wished he had gone out with, thought should have gone out with him even if he wasn't interested, when he was 25. It recounts malicious gossip and slander about his coworkers in the 50s and 60s for no discernable reason. Why anybody would want to rake this muck for public view is a very interesting question. The Gamow of the title is dismissed without fuss or regret on page 239 ("he died prematurely of alcohol-induced liver failure"), though he is purportedly one of the central figures in the narrative. Goodness knows what might have transpired without alliteration.

Many have wondered if the discovery of DNA structure was a stroke of genius, or a lucky fluke of being in the right place at the right time. This first-hand report points unforgivingly at the latter conclusion.

While I am a scientifically trained person, I did like this book, and I found it to be (on the whole) a "fast" read. The world of Jim Watson, in this work, really revolves around his relationship with a 17-year-old undergraduate, as well as his tries at dating people possibly more closer to his age. We see him succeed at trying to woo Christa, but then we also see his heart break when she announces that she does not have the same feelings for him. It's truely a love story that many people have been in, including me. Looking at this side of the book, it's excellent.

However, the science involved in this book was maybe the most lacking. We know he's doing research, but at times, we're left as to wonder what he was doing, or what he was working on. This was probably the most confusing and "slow" parts of the book because it just didn't seem to mesh well...and this part was probably the most hastily written. Also, the book seemed to end abruptly; Dr. Watson probably could have gone much further, but it left the readers hanging with the question "So what was next?"

Otherwise, this book is very good as a follow up to "The Double Helix."

I suspect that this book may be somewhat interesting if the "big names" of science during that era already mean something to you (the text is heavily littered with them). Apart from that it amounts to little more than the boring diary-like minutia-filled account of a few years in the life of a scientist after a major discovery, when nothing of great note subsequently happened. It is almost unheard of for me not to finish a book but I could not even make it to half way with this one.