Physicist Amok

There’s been a lot of controversy around James Watson over the last couple of days, to the point where emails have been flying around the Rockefeller University talking about boycotting his receipt of the Lewis Thomas Prize for Writing. I haven’t read his book, I find his statements somewhat ridiculous, and worse, I don’t think he actually made that big a contribution, even aside from stealing data. I think two points are enough:

1. Schrodinger wrote What is life? in 1944, nine years before the Watson and Crick paper, and laid out what was necessary for a molecule that carried hereditary structure. With the discovery of DNA methylation and other modifications, it’s become more and more clear that the pure double helix isn’t the sole carrier of hereditary character. Yes, it was nice to actually know what the molecule was, but it wasn’t one of the most important discoveries of the 20th century. The evolutionary synthesis was. The new quantum mechanics was. The structure of this molecule was not. It was a technical tour de force at the time, but Watson and Crick didn’t even do that.

2. I see far too many descriptions of figuring out the rough structure of DNA as “cracking the secrets of life.” It did no such thing. Before Watson and Crick, we knew that it was a polymer (Levene, 1919); we knew that it carried heritable structure (Avery, 1943); we knew that heritable structure was laid out linearly along the polymer (Morgan, no later than 1915). Crick laid out the “central dogma” of molecular biology in 1957, and everyone dug in and figured out how the encodings worked. The structure of DNA was a pleasant thing to have in your head for doing this, but the classical geneticists had been doing very well without such structures for many years. Unfortunately, having such a structure immediately made lots of people confuse genes (heritable traits, alleles of which are selected in evolution) with ORFs (pieces of DNA transcribed into RNA).