The Double Helix

These chapters chart an exciting burst of progress, beginning with Crick’s success on helical diffraction and then moving to the use of Franklin’s data as a spring board for a viable DNA structure. They make quick, excited progress and by the end of Chapter 12 are looking close to a breakthrough.

There is also though a hint of something impetuous in the hunt for that “elegant solution,” an over-enthusiasm, perhaps, to catch the answer quickly. Here their gambling tendency comes into tension with the full complexity of the task. We also have the introduction of Crick’s wife, Odile, and a return to questions of sex and gender. 

Odile presents an interesting contrast to Rosalind Franklin, who is implicitly criticised for resisting conventional gender norms in both her appearance and attitude. Odile, by contrast, seems to Watson the ideal wife for an intellectual: she is charming and intelligent, but in a non-threatening way. She shows no interest in science; her focus instead is on fashion, style, and the Cambridge social scene. While she may be presented as a bohemian, in terms of normative gender roles, her relationship with Crick is very conventional: her sphere is the home, which she is praised for making so “cheerful, if not playful” (46).

Conversation with Odile often turns to the young attractive women in Cambridge, “popsies,” as Watson refers to them. They are discussed as objects of attraction and amusement that add “sparkle to life” (47) but they are presented as existing in a different domain to the serious world of work and science. One’s mind may be on science or women, but for Watson, the two are very much considered separate spheres of interest. The line in Chapter 12, “all thoughts of women […] were banished as soon Francis breezed into the lab” (65), neatly captures this sense of separation. That same implicit separation seems to inform Crick’s relationship with his wife.

One of the reasons Franklin seems to present a problem in Watson’s narrative is because her presence confuses this neat distinction. She is both a woman and a serious scientist, but because of the limiting way both femininity and science are here defined, it’s as if she can’t quite either properly be one or the other (and certainly not both at the same time). Because of this she retains a fundamental ambiguity. It’s almost like she herself is an irregular molecule that refuses to be neatly solved. In Chapter 10, when she delivers her lecture, Watson flippantly struggles with this ambiguity, imagining what she would look like with a more attractive hairstyle before bringing his mind back to the scientific content of her lecture. In contrast to the charming Odile, there is “no warmth or frivolity in her words” (49).

For all this, her scientific talent and importance cannot be dismissed, and it is her evidence which will prove crucial. Her strength in this respect is presented in another problematic way: it is comically re-imagined as a kind of matronly authority. The lecture is described almost as a telling-off. Molecular models become “tinker-toys” (49) and her authority is presented as comically emasculating. Watson reflects it would be “a bad way to go out […] to be told, by a woman, to refrain from venturing an opinion” (50).

It is a point made in a light-hearted tone, but it is nonetheless another troubling moment for the modern reader. Is the only way Franklin’s intellectual authority can be processed is as a threat to masculine identity? She is literally presented as impeding Wilken’s work on DNA through her gender.

As Watson and Crick close in on a solution, the question of motivation is raised again. What seems to drive them most is not the noble pursuit of scientific truth, but a sense of proving themselves and scoring a major victory: “then it would be obvious to the world that Pauling was not the only one capable of true insight” (55).

Perhaps this is another example of Watson’s noted honesty and frankness, an insight into the very human motivations that lie behind science and its development. It also has the effect of making science feel a bit like a boyish race or a game; the fact that their main tools superficially resemble “tinker-toys” adds another resonance to this point.

We see other mini-examples of this same gaming spirit. It’s in the race between Cochran and Cricks for the helical diffraction theory, and in the aside in Chapter 12, where Watson tells us of Cricks’ lunchtime attempts to interpret Huxley’s data.

Like all games, the game of science comes with its rules, the etiquette of “fair play,” and the possibility of grey-areas and foul-play. One of the big questions posed by Watson’s account is whether they ever overstepped the bounds of fair play.

We also have in the Crick-Huxley aside another repetition of the tension between the experimental and the theoretical approaches. Crick works in sweeping, conjecturing theories that can move quickly, but ultimately need the verification of the more ponderous empirical approaches.

This is played out in larger form in the opposition between Crick &Watson’s and Wilkins & Franklin’s respective approaches to solving DNA. Despite their differences, Wilkins and Franklin are both unconvinced by the game of theorising and model-building, and believe in the steady experimental approach. Crick and Watson at this point may be paying too little heed to the experimental, as they get caught up in the race, and the possibility that their theorising can deliver a quick win.