The Discovery of DNA (First-Hand Account by James Watson)

 

  The discovery of the structure of DNA by Francis Crick and James Watson was one of the most dramatic chapters in the history of science. In 1952, Watson was 24 years old and a visiting research fellow at the Cavendish laboratory in Cambridge. Watson and Crick were aware that they were not alone in the pursuit of the DNA structure. The effort at King’s College in London was impeded by the mutual antagonism between the protagonists, Maurice Wilkins and Rosalind Franklin, while the main competition was from California, where resided the formidable Linus Pauling, by common consent, the world’s pre-eminent structural chemist. By happy chance Watson was sharing an office with Pauling’s son, Peter, who was a graduate student in the Cavendish.

     “ Peter had a broad grin on his face as he sauntered into the office one afternoon in December. In his hand was a letter from the States. It was from his father. In addition to routine family gossip was the long-feared news that Linus now had a structure for DNA. No details were given of what he was up to.

Francis then began pacing up and down the room thinking aloud, hoping that in a great intellectual fervor he could reconstruct what Linus might have done. As long as Linus had not told us the answer, we should get equal credit if we announced it at the same time. Nothing worth while had emerged, though, by the time we walked upstairs to tea and told Mark Perutz and John Kendrew of the letter. Bragg (the director of the laboratory) was in for a moment, but neither of us wanted the perverse joy of informing him that the English labs were once again about to be humiliated by the Americans. As we munched chocolate biscuits, John tried to cheer us up with the possibility of Linus being wrong. After all, he had never seen Maurice’s and Rosy’s pictures (the X-ray diffraction photographs from King’s College). Our hearts told us otherwise.“

  In February, Pauling completed his paper and sent a copy of the manuscript to Cambridge. Watson was by then in a lather of nervous anticipation. Two copies were dispatched to Cambridge – one to Sir Lawrence (Bragg), the other to Peter. Bragg’s response upon receiving it was to put it aside. Not knowing that Peter would also have a copy, he hesitated to take the manuscript down to Max’s office. There Francis would see it and set off on another wild-goose chase. That is, if his thesis was finished on schedule, then for a year, if not more, with Crick in exile in Brooklyn (at the Polytechnic Institute where he was to work), peace and serenity would prevail.

Peter’s face betrayed something important as he entered the door, and my stomach sank in apprehension at learning that all was lost. Seeing that neither Francis nor I could bear any further suspense, he quickly told us that the model was a three-chain helix with the sugar-phosphate backbone in the centre.

  This sounded suspiciously like our aborted effort of last year that immediately I wondered whether we might have already have had the credit and glory of a great discovery if Bragg had not held us back. Giving Francis no chance to ask for the manuscript, I pulled it out of Peter’s coat pocket and began reading.

  By spending less than a minute with the summary and introduction, I was soon at the figures showing the locations of essential atoms. At once I felt something was wrong.” Pauling’s model was inconsistent with the experimental data, available to Watson and Crick but not to Pauling, but, worse, it was chemically improbable.” Only in a matter of weeks Watson and Crick found a model structure so compelling that there could be no doubt it was correct.

2. In the text find equivalents to the following phrases:

- научный сотрудник, находящийся в командировке

- по общему признанию

- обычные семейные сплетни

- новость, которой давно боялись

- получить такое же признание

- ещё одна погоня за миражом

- будут царить покой и тишина

- отвлечь от  чего-то

- не в состоянии выносить неизвестность

- неудачная попытка

 

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