Hamlet in the Lab: Watson v. Franklin (et al)

Previously on The Most Elegant Puzzle, I read the prologue of James Watson's The Double Helix and decided despite claims to honesty and accuracy, it was just as it also claimed to be--a retroactive diary, unreliable. While useful and interesting, it should be only be approached with the utmost skepticism. Part way through, I noted that I didn't consider Watson's attempt to backtrack a bit on his treatment of Rosalind Franklin in his personal account to be good enough. I said that would be a whole other blog post.

This is that blog post, and then some.

Rosalind Franklin

Rosalind Franklin was an x-ray crystallographer, which means her work involved firing x-rays at the atoms in crystals to create an image that enables someone to determine their structure, something Patricia Fara (in her four thousand year history of science) describes as requiring 'huge amounts of skill and patience'. In the early fifties and at the time of the events of the Double Helix, she was working at King's College London. She is best known for taking the photograph that clinched the double helical shape of DNA-- a photograph that was 'borrowed' without her knowledge by Maurice Wilkins (also working at King's) and shown to James Watson and Francis Crick.

This more tangible injustice, however, is not the end of it. In The Double Helix, Franklin gets the most unfavourable description of anyone. I stole this condensed version of Watson's description of Franklin from this excellent mini account of Franklin's life, but it's accurate to the early part of Watson's book.

By choice she did not emphasize her feminine qualities. . . . There was never lipstick to contrast with her straight black hair, while at the age of thirty-one her dresses showed all the imagination of English blue-stocking adolescents. So it was quite easy to imagine her the product of an unsatisfied mother who unduly stressed the desirability of professional careers that could save bright girls from marriages to dull men. . . . Clearly Rosy had to go or be put in her place. . . The thought could not be avoided that the best home for a feminist was in another person's lab.

Charming, eh? Watson never criticises her abilities as a scientist and I have no reason to believe that he is not abolutely sincere when he says she was good at what she did. After all, it was her photograph that provided him with the evidence to make his famous discovery. We should remember, also that Watson claims he is writing as if he was in the early fifties. He also does comment earlier that the women at King's were required to eat separately from the men, implying he views this as injust.

However, this does not undo the sexist nature of his comments and I think this is worth a bit of attention. A blogger called Nick B., writing here, concludes:

All indications are that she [Franklin] was a very brusque and forward person. She, according to her close friends, could be bossy and impatient, not because she was mean, but because she was so serious about science. One of her friends, Anne Sayre, pointed out that she could often come off as far more stubborn or opposed to an idea than she actually was. Watson’s account of her personality was confused and incorrect; he clearly didn’t fully understand her, as he admitted in the epilogue. But I think, generally speaking, he probably accurately described their initial interactions and first impressions, which was Watson’s stated goal.  

 As I said in my previous blog post, Watson's personal truth has no bearing on the historical accuracy of his statemnt and the fact remains that this is the record that he has left behind-- and did so with full knowledge of what he was doing. If he actually started planning the book in 1953, he had over 15 years to work out the exact language of his book. He chose not (only) to focus on her stubborn, bossy, impatient personality, as Nick B. implies, but on her looks (decrying her lack of lipstick and 'unimaginative' clothing choices). To me, this is a complaint made particularly of women by people who seem to be under the impression that a woman has a duty to look a certain way in order to appear professional (when few uphold such standards for men). This is, of course, pure sexism.

The final comment, that a feminist belonged in someone else's lab, stems from tension between Franklin and Wilkins. They were both working on DNA, and both apparently under the impression that DNA was theirs to work on. Wilkins was, according to Watson, under the impression that Franklin was to take an assisting role. Franklin was under no such impression and naturally refused to be subjugated.

In 1976, Jerry Donohue (also an insider to this story with an instrumental role to play in the structure of DNA) wrote a comprehensive review following the publication of a book by the aforementioned friend of Franklin, Anne Sayre. The book was called Rosalind Franklin and DNA and posthumously told Franklin's story. Donohue's review not only covers his response to this book but also Watson's dismissive (yet cutting) so-called non-response to its publication ("It’s just too complicated. She [Sayre] might as well have her fun. No comment.") It also tackles a longer reposte from Farooq Hussain, writing (with some possible bias) from King's College itself.

Franklin's (and Ray Gosling's) X-Ray photograph of DNA

But let's put the details of Donohue's review aside because I think that there is something to be said about the furor (Donohue uses the word "brouhaha") surrounding Watson's memoir. The amount written about this period is astonishing. Dozens of people have tried to unpick this story, detail by detail, personality by personality, interaction by interaction, and tell that honest tale of the discovery of DNA. The events of 1951-53 are only the beginning. The whole backlash decades later is Act II.  It's Hamlet in the lab, heaving with characters and confusion.

Almost everyone involved has weighed in, or been required to weigh in--perhaps because of the delay of Watson's book often long after the fact. It is evident that Sayre interviewed Wilkins and Francis Crick in the seventies in order to her write her take on Franklin. Wilkins wrote an autobiography (2003), which must be an interesting read. Hussain, as he was at King's College and worked in the field clearly had a vested interest. Jerry Donohue, as I have already said, was also involved-- he shared an office with Watson and Crick. We haven't even mentioned Ray Gosling, Franklin's assistant, and of course J.T. Randall, the Director of Biophysics at King's, who fatefully muddied the waters between Wilkins and Franklin by misleading them both on their roles. Part of this has to be that Franklin died in the late fifties, long before Watson assassinated her character and her gender in his retroactive diary, so her voice--of all the clamouring voices involved in this tangled story--is crucially missing. 

Would her voice put the discussion to bed? Perhaps. Perhaps not. The drama, and the drama about the drama, goes on.

Oddly though, Watson the ultimate winner, the last voice, because of what he says at the beginning of his book. Remember? He wrote:

As I hope this book will show, science seldom proceeds in the straightforward logical manner imagined by outsiders. Instead, its steps forward (and sometimes backward) are often very human events in which personalities and cultural traditions play major roles.

And--although probably didn't intend it the way it turned out--having created with the publication of his 'honest' tale a perfect storm of conflicting reports, records and memories, wasn't he entirely right about that? 

*

In addition to the works linked in the post above, I also read this Independent article (which I remembered seeing the news about when it happened): "Fury at DNA Pioneer's theory: Africans are Less Intelligent than Westerners." It does nothing to dispell a very dim view of James Watson.

The Jerry Donohue review is called 'Honest Jim?' and can be found in The Quarterly Review of Biology, Vol. 51, No. 2, Jun., 1976  pps. 285-289.

I also read the Wikipedia entry on Rosalind Franklin, which is where I got her photograph. 

James Watson's Retroactive Diary

The James Watson of the Past

So, this isn't really a review of James Watson's famous book The Double Helix, but a response to his prologue.

James Watson is commonly known as one of the co-discoverers of the double helix structure of DNA, along with Francis Crick and Maurice Wilkins. The Double Helix book retells the discovery, in a way deliberately not free of James Watson's personality. To explain his approach, he writes:

As I hope this book will show, science seldom proceeds in the straightforward logical manner imagined by outsiders. Instead, its steps forward (and sometimes backward) are often very human events in which personalities and cultural traditions play major roles.

There are lots of ways to tell a history. Many of them are primarily factual: "this happened on this day". Lots take into account the events or the society (including cultural traditions) surrounding the key characters-- think of Einstein and Eddington's pacifism in World War One bringing them together. Some go into personal relationships and backgrounds-- the writer Dava Sobel has a tendency to try this (sometimes fictionally). But it's only since books like The Double Helix, in 1968, that we've really got much of a sense of the role of personality, particularly from the person involved.

Watson wants this book to be true and accurate. In fact, he had always wanted the book to be accurate:

The thought that I should write this book has been with me almost from the moment the double helix was found. Thus my memory of many of the significant events is much more complete than that of most other episodes in my life.  

He not only intends to be accurate concerning the events of 1951-1953 but also accurate to his own interpretation and responses to events and people. This is not "the discovery of the structure of DNA" this is Watson's version. In fact, the original title of the book was to be Honest Jim.

Importantly, he (attempts) to give himself a get-out-of-jail-free card for anything he might say that is controversial or rude, stating that he is writing as if without the benefit of hindsight, an as-it-happens account:

Thus many of the comments may seem one-sided and unfair, but this is often the case in the incomplete and hurried way in which human beings frequently decide to like or dislike a new idea or acquaintance.

This wasn't all that successful because the book, initally intended to be published through Harvard University Press but was blocked by both Watson's co-authors of the original article Wilkins and Crick (and I might speculatively add the university itself as universities are definitely in the business of deciding what is beneficial for them to be directly associated with).

There was an entire 1980 critical edition published by Norton that included some of the criticism and responses to criticism that surrounded the publication of the book.

But how accurate is such an "honest" retelling? Certainly every scientist knows that what we believe to be the case and what is the case are not the same thing. Watson partially acknowledged this in the epilogue of The Double Helix, particularly in the case of his description of the scientist Rosalind Franklin whose work was instrumental in the discovery.*

James Watson Nowadays

Is it perhaps better to regard Watson's book more of a diary after-the-fact than a historical recount? A diary is honest to the minute but usually considerably inaccurate with the benefit of hindsight. He states he was planning to write a book from the point the discovery was made. It's not such a huge leap to speculate that he was in fact writing an imaginary diary before he began working on DNA, keeping phrases in his mind or in notebooks and his letters to his parents (which he says he used for date references) that then made it into the book. I think there is a kind of prodigal, ambitious person who does this and I think Watson falls easily into both prodigal (attending university at 15) and ambitious categories.

The Double Helix is absolutely an interesting and valuable text to have in the world but I'm not sure that accurate is the right word. The book may be relatively or entirely accurate to the personal truth and that certainly has a powerful voice, but as soon as he starts writing sentences which ascribe beliefs and actions to people that aren't him we surely have to assume that (considering Crick or Wilkins' conspicuous lack of blessing for this book), Watson may as well be making stuff up. In short, it's a personal retroactive diary with all that entails when using it as a historical text.

 *I should note that Watson's misogynism, at the very least towards Franklin (and towards his sister) I don't think are undone by his epilogue explanation (although let's make some allowances for the Pleasantville attitudes that probably abounded). I found a blogger who wrote something about this that I vehemently disagree with but again, that's another blog post.