Genes, Girls, and Gamow by James D. Watson
Ah! Science in the Fifties. A time when practical jokes abounded in the lab and every experiment got published in Nature, or at least it did if you were Jim Watson. In this amusing, if not embellished, account of his post-doc life (post-helix, as well) we enjoy the company of nearly every famous scientist around, from Russian spies to a British Rothschild. As part of the exciting academic circles racing to crack the genetic code, the skinny boy from Indiana makes a name for himself with one bold hypothesis after another, while finding himself slapped in the face with a few wrong ideas. But that’s the fickle Lady-Science, after all! It’s all worth it when Salvador Dali portrays your thesis topic on canvas. The McCarthy Era upheavals and military draft of his day further show us that a long-standing enemy of science, second only to women, is politics.
People love to hate Watson, often toting him as an arrogant misogynist. However, I feel the man is not given his due credit for daring to liven up the serious academic tedium we all battle. For me, the novel is a comforting reminder that science can be fun, and you don’t necessarily have to downplay your personality to be a success. Also, having been accused of one of this century’s biggest intellectual thefts, Watson nonetheless admits that Rosalind Franklin’s perseverance never let him, or anyone else, get the best of her, portraying her as a damn good sport after losing the helix race, more concerned with the quest for scientific truth rather than glory. Watson shows how Franklin’s ability to generate fresh ideas made her later work with viruses ultimately triumphant. He also admires her refined sense of modesty and wit, describing her as a truly selfless scientist.
Throughout the novel, Watson’s youthful need for a little diversion brings him into the company of not a few quirky Nobel physicists, like Richard Feynman and George Gamow, each with a bottle of whisky in tow. Follow Jim, the perpetual bachelor, and his rowdy scientific collaborators as they drive to their summer watering hole – that is, Cape Cod science haven Woods Hole – to terrorize the society ladies and flirt with the barely-legal undergraduates. But these are not frat boy pranks, for Watson is more romantically fragile than his impervious façade would indicate.
If you think that being single nowadays in the lab is rough, rest assured that even “Honest Jim” agonized over how to maintain a shred of personal life. Many of his struggles will seem familiar to the modern student. For instance, Jim first chooses a revered senior scientist at Caltech for a post-doc mentor, only to find him too rigid and controlling. After much deliberation, he decides that switching labs is absolutely fine, a decision many self-flagellating grad students never quite reach. Nevertheless, it’s refreshing to know that even Watson made a false start in his graduate education, for how often have I wished for such courage to abandon a stagnant project and switch to something more exciting? Another saga Jim faces is trying to keep a long-distance relationship, and of course his crush is on a professor’s daughter just out of high school. These gut-wrenching lessons of unrequited love are hard-won for Jim, and reminded me of my own heartbreaks that jolted me violently from any thought of lab work, but um, made me stronger in the end.
Overall, Watson’s story makes the life of a molecular biologist look like one big dinner party. Perhaps he’s right in not wanting to bore audiences with long hours of bench work or abysmal data analysis, but it’s unnerving to find him climbing the Swiss Alps and camping out in sunny California throughout the book, when he ought to be in lab, right? Another bitter reality is that times sure have changed since these heady days of frontier science. With the exponentially-growing number of scientists crowding over a seemingly finite number of ideas, truly trailblazing science à la Watson & Crick may feel a bit like an artifact of the past. But the hopefulness of Watson’s era remains fresh because the genetic revolution is far from finished; in fact, in many ways, we’ve just begun to understand the intricate yet simple machinery of DNA.
Watson’s fearless perspective on how to tackle the “big questions” in biology comes candidly, as if chatting with us over coffee. He guides us step-by-step through the milestones of academia, from Ph.D. to post-doc to job talk. Perhaps best of all are the whimsical doodles and prank letters included as supplemental materials. He’s revealed his complaint Letter to Nature about how biologists get all jargon-happy at describing the exact same process (i.e. viral “transduction,” “transfection,” “transformation”), and so decided to top them all with his own satirical Watsonese term, “inter-bacterial interaction.” This book is a quick read for anybody needing to kill a little time nearby their PCR machine, and will be equally entertaining to people who have never seen one.
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