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book reviews

NATURE CELL BIOLOGY VOL2 AUGUST 2000 www.nature.com/ncbE148

Honest Jim

When our descendants three or fourhundred years from now look backon the century that has just passed,

they will cite the names of James Watsonand Francis Crick, doing so in the same rev-erential tone that we use when referring toIsaac Newton. With every passing year, itbecomes increasingly clear that the DNArevolution that Watson and Crick triggeredwill be every bit as important as Newton’s.

These two did far more than ignite theinitial flame of a revolution; by helping usunderstand how translation, ribosomes,and messenger RNA operate, they also con-tributed substantially to the integration andconsolidation of ideas that led, over theensuing decade, to the formulation of theCentral Dogma. Although their names willsurely survive, those of all other 20th-cen-tury biologists will, for better or worse, becovered over by the sands of time.

Thanks to robust constitutions, goodluck, and a touch of modern medicine, bothare still with us, very active and vibrant. Forthose of us who have practised biology overthe past decades, these two have become liv-ing icons, pillars holding up the firmamentof biology. Having launched the revolution,they seem to have spent the next half cen-tury making sure that it advanced on agood track.

In the future there will be those who willwant to know what Watson and Crick werereally like and how their 20th-centurywatershed event actually happened. Whatwere its precedents and conceptual under-pinnings? Who among us, they will ask,knew these two up close? Might we sharesome amusing anecdotes that shed light ontheir personae? How did their clearly unu-sual intellects operate? And what psychicfuel stoked their internal fires?

Descriptions of the events that led up tothe revolution of 1953 are already available;Watson’s own book, The Double Helix,recounts from his own very personal per-spective the research and thinking that ledup to the historic discovery. Horace FreelandJudson’s The Eighth Day of Creation does this

in a less idiosyncratic, more systematic, and,of course, far more objective way.

Still, this existing literature will hardlyslake the thirst of those who want to knoweverything about Watson and Crick. Of thetwo, Jim Watson has been more visible in thepublic arena. He has not been shy and rarelyhas he been out of the limelight. After thedecade of discovery that started in 1953, hewent on to build up the Cold Spring HarborLaboratory from a virtual shambles into aworld-class research centre, and then pro-ceeded to shepherd the Human GenomeProject into existence.

During the course of all this, he has spentmuch time agonizing about where the DNArevolution is taking us. He has done so witha strong voice and has never pulled hispunches. Very uncomfortable with equivo-cation and impatient with mushy thinkingand ideological cant, he wants argumentslaid out clearly on the table.

Watson’s new book adds to the historicalaccounts of the mid-20th-century revo-lution and provides some peeks into hisown persona. A Passion for DNA is ananthology of his writings over the past twodecades. Some of his pieces accurately fore-tell how things were going to develop, onoccasion a decade ahead of time. Others arebroadsides launched during the controversyin the late 1970s about gene cloning andrecombinant DNA. More recently, he hasbeen in the thick of the debates swirlingaround the Human Genome Project,genome sequencing, and genetic diagnosis.

This book is vintage Watson – well-crafted prose, frequently opinionated, pas-sionate, always strong-voiced, and showingoccasional impatience with those who arenot as smart as he (almost everyone) orwho take a position that he finds quite sim-ply to be wrong. The essays are occasionallyredundant, later ones returning to themesand arguments made earlier. Still, this bookremains a good read, sometimes very enter-taining. On occasion, Watson has come toregret some of his strongly voiced opinions.One referred to repeatedly involves his initial

embracing of the Asilomar resolutions thatled to a two-year moratorium on variousforms of DNA cloning. As more experienceaccumulated on recombinant DNA and its(virtually non-existent) dangers, he increas-ingly became disenchanted with regulationsthat made no sense, and, always pragmatic,led the charge to dismantle them, taking noprisoners.

His agonizing about the DNA technol-ogy that he helped to spawn is very appar-ent. On one hand, it surely offers greatpromise for addressing a vast array of bio-medical problems. But on the other, as withmost new technologies, it has its potentialdark sides, in this case genetic determin-ism, genetic discrimination, and eugenicsof the most egregious sort. By denouncingthe Nazi pseudo-science of racial genetics,Jim Watson buys credibility among thosewho would depict DNA technologists asscientists run amok, the lineal descendantsof the German scientists who aided andabetted the Third Reich in its efforts to cre-ate a genetically superior race. His tone isnot unlike that of the nuclear physicistswho, having created The Bomb in the1940s, drew back in horror and for theremainder of their lives campaigned pub-licly, and with success, to rein in the tech-nology they had developed.

Watson’s conflict about DNA technol-ogy and its societal impact is never fullyresolved. As passionate an advocate ofgenomics as he is, he knows that none of uscan foretell the future – where this new sci-ence will take us, how it will help us, andhow it may one day be abused. In agonizingas he does about genetics and its future, hereminds us implicitly that we scientists,having created a technology, are obliged toexplain it to the outside world and toimmerse ourselves in the societal debatesabout how it will be used and how we canprevent its misuse.Robert A. Weinberg is in the WhiteheadInstitute for Biomedical Research,Cambridge, MA 02142, USAe-mail: weinberg@wi.mit.edu

A Passion for DNA ‘Genes, Genomes and Society’ by James D. Watson

Oxford University Press/Cold Spring Harbor Press, £18.99, $25

Robert Weinberg