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Chapter 12
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in The Double Helix, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Research, Adventure, and the Thrill of Discovery
Scientific Collaboration, Competition, and Community
DNA and the Secret of Life
Academic Life and the University
Summary
Analysis
In the morning, Maurice Wilkins, Rosalind Franklin, Willy Seeds, and R.G. Gosling visited Cambridge, where Crick and Watson explained their theory. But their visitors weren’t amused. Wilkins noted that his colleague already calculated that DNA must be a helix, while Franklin argued that there was no empirical evidence for a helical structure at all.
Apparently, Crick and Watson’s work wasn’t as original or insightful as they hoped. In fact, Wilkins and Franklin’s attitudes suggest that they viewed Crick and Watson as wasting their time. Plus, Wilkins and Franklin’s strong disagreement about DNA's shape made it difficult for Crick and Watson to learn anything meaningful from their initial comments.
Themes
Rosalind Franklin also noted argued that magnesium ions wouldn’t be able to hold DNA together. Worse still, Watson realized that he misquoted the water content of Franklin’s DNA samples to Crick. This mistake led the duo to wrongly eliminate many possible models. Over lunch, everyone agreed that Crick and Watson should next investigate whether there are magnesium ions in DNA. But their findings clearly weren’t going to change their visitors’ research agendas. Back in the lab, Crick and Watson started to see their molecular model as worthless trash. Their visitors rushed off to the train station.
Crick and Watson’s first model wasn’t simply plausible but unoriginal—rather, it was seriously flawed to the point that it was chemically impossible. As their meeting with Franklin and Wilkins started to collapse, Crick and Watson began to evaluate how they went wrong. Ultimately, they ended up humiliating themselves before their senior colleagues because they let ambition, arrogance, and enthusiasm cloud their judgment. In fact, Crick and Watson’s overconfidence is another important sign that science really depends on people’s whims and emotions, even if it’s supposed to arrive at clear and objective results.
Themes
