The Secret of Life

In spring of 1968 I was sitting in my high school biology class listening to Mr. Gasiorowski explain the miracle of life. He was excited, transported, his face illuminated. He reverentially talked about James Watson and the discovery of the double helix. Sometime afterward, I found Watson’s book The Double Helix: A Personal Account of the Discovery of the Structure of DNA on the shelf of the drug store I passed on my walk home from school and spent my meagre allowance to buy it.

My teacher knew that the discovery marked a watershed moment. But Watson’s book was part mythos and novelized for effect.

James Watson and Francis Crick were young and brilliant, two people in a race to discover the structure of the building blocks of what makes us what we are. Also in the race was “the world’s greatest living chemist,” Linus Pauling of the California Institute of Technology. Maurice Wilkens and Rosalind Franklin were at King’s College working “the old-fashioned, scientific way–with the slow work and steady accretion of data.” Pauling and Watson/Crick were on the wrong track; Pauling’s idea had a glaring flaw, and they were looking for a triple helix.

Watson solved the dilemma only after he saw a xray of DNA taken by Franklin, shared without her knowledge. And he never properly accredited her work as contributing to his discovery. Now, Howard Markel writes, it is time to tell how it really happened.

The Secret of Life is filled with big personalities, flawed and eccentric. Inevitably, these scientists clashed over theory and they clashed personally.

Rosalind Franklin was brilliant, dedicated to her work, committed to scientific facts, and “devastatingly blunt”. She worked in X-ray crystallography of DNA. As a Jewish female scientist she had everything stacked against her. She grated on Maurice Wilkins, “a bag of neuroses” who may have been in love with her and angry that she kept her distance.

Watson was impatient and clumsy; he didn’t do experiments but envisioned things in his head and then built a model. Crick was the mathematician with a “dazzling” grasp of biophysics. The two hit it off right away.

Wilkens and Franklin were doing the bedrock of scientific research.

Also in the race was the eccentric Pauling, who had helped create the Atom bomb and now wanted to contribute something monumentally positive to science.

Watson and Crick’s structure explains everything. Linus Pauling quoted in The Secret of Life

Markel follows the scientific advancement of understanding DNA, first with the history. Then, he follows the rivals in their research and their personal lives, showing all the steps in their understanding along the way. Watson and Crick won the acclaim for discovering the structure of DNA, forgetting to mention the x-ray that gave Watson the insight he needed.

Franklin’s early death from cancer was likely caused from the radiation she was exposed to in her work. Before her death, she became close to Crick and she and Watson forgot their differences.

Watson invited Wilkens to share in the prize, but not Franklin. “You don’t usually win the Nobel Prize for data you can’t interpret,” Watkins said to the author. But he also admitted his actions were not “exactly honorable.”

Markel’s book is at once high drama and an explanation of the science that lead up to Watson’s ah-ha moment. I grasped the idea of the chemistry without understanding chemistry (chemistry was not one of my finer achievements in high school). It was a challenging read for me, but my interest was caught by the wonderful portraits of these personalities.

I received a galley from the publisher through NetGalley. My review is fair and unbiased.

"The Secret of Life is a story of genius and perseverance, but also a saga of cronyism, misogyny, anti-Semitism, and misconduct. Drawing on voluminous archival research, including interviews with James Watson and with Franklin’s sister, Jenifer Glynn, Markel provides a fascinating look at how science is done, how reputations are undone, and how history is written, and revised."

This quote from the publisher's description sums up the book nicely. It's more about personalities than about science, though science plays a huge role. As a woman, it was painful but unsurprising to read about how Franklin was abused and slandered by her male colleagues.

Above all, this book elevates Franklin to the place she deserves. Her X-ray work likely cost her her life, but revealed the structure of DNA that led to Watson and Crick's Nobel Prize winning breakthrough. Her name belongs beside theirs for the rest of time.

Thanks, NetGalley, for the ARC I received. This is my honest and voluntary review.

This is the book I've been waiting for as a scientist. The discovery of the structure of DNA is something that's been repeated to me throughout each increment of my education. Occasionally Rosalind Franklin would be mentioned, albeit infrequently & briefly, and as I became older it began to be more of a bug-bear, the fact that the credit for the discovery went to two men, who in reality stole data & the credit from Rosalind herself.
Despite this, the book hinges more on the personalities of those involved & the intricacies and interactions between them.
I'd say this is a must read for anyone who wants to learn more about what happened between these scientists. Having said this, I do think some biology knowledge or a fond liking for wikipedia is necessary to get the most from this, as in some places the language can get quite technical, particularly where the x-ray crystallography is concerned.