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Chapter 1
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
Crick didn’t study DNA before meeting Watson, but he was certainly interested in it. At the time, most scientists thought that genes were protein molecules, but a few—including Crick—thought they were made of DNA. However, Crick’s lab was working on proteins, and it would have been too costly and time-consuming to switch to studying DNA instead. More importantly, Crick’s friend Maurice Wilkins had already spent years studying DNA. In England—unlike in the U.S. or France—scientists generally considered it disrespectful to step on each other’s toes by undertaking similar research. However, Crick also couldn’t stand how Wilkins understated his own work’s importance.
The scientific controversy about the nature of genes highlights how significant Crick and Watson's discovery truly was: not only did they describe DNA’s structure, but in doing so, they also definitively proved its importance to the scientific community. But the limits of Crick’s lab also show that social constraints within that scientific community determined whether this research was even possible. Similarly, Crick and Watson’s concerns about getting in Maurice Wilkins’s way reflect the thorny conflict between the importance of scientists’ of research and their ethical obligations to other scientists.
Themes
Maurice Wilkins also constantly feuded with Rosalind Franklin, who worked in the same lab as him at King’s College London. Watson strongly criticizes Franklin, whom he calls “Rosy” and refers to as Wilkins’s assistant. Watson explains that he found Franklin’s appearance insufficiently feminine and considered it inappropriate that she wanted to do her own research, instead of just following Wilkins’s orders. Watson feels sorry for Wilkins, who had to listen to Franklin complain about sexism at the university. In fact, Watson concludes that Wilkins had to fire Franklin in order to succeed with his research. Wilkins also had to deal with competition from the American chemist Linus Pauling, who wanted to study his X-ray images of DNA.
Watson portrays Rosalind Franklin as practically the opposite of the jovial, collaborative Francis Crick. And yet, while Watson praises Crick’s eccentricity and independent-mindedness about scientific problems, he sees these same traits as problems in Franklin. In fact, he primarily judges Franklin for not meeting his expectations of women—that they dress to please men and obediently follow men’s orders. Thus, Watson’s blatantly misogynistic comments show his readers what kind of hostile environment women scientists had to cope with in the 1950s. But Watson’s comments aren’t just sexist—they’re also plain wrong. He makes basic errors about Franklin’s name and position at the laboratory (Franklin didn’t go by Rosy and was Wilkins’s research partner, not his assistant). It’s difficult to say whether these mistakes are intentional, but regardless, they clearly show that Watson didn’t take Franklin seriously.
Themes
