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Chapter 20
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
Watson joined Cambridge’s Clare College, since this allowed him to live in a dormitory. But he couldn’t stand the college’s food, so he generally ate out—until he started getting stomach pains from eating too much foreign food. The doctor wasn’t very sympathetic and just gave him a bottle of white medicine that didn’t work. The same night as his visit to the doctor, he also visited Francis and Odile Crick at their new house. They helped him with his plot to enter the boarding house where the French girls stayed on their exchange programs.
Watson was much younger than most of his colleagues, including Crick, and he didn’t have an established family or social network when he arrived at Cambridge. Therefore, a year into his time there, his feelings about his social life were clearly mixed. On the one hand, everything was taken care of for him, and he got to pursue his passion all day. On the other, he was also lonely, and he never had a break from work to do anything else.
Themes
Back at home, Watson read new biochemistry papers about protein synthesis and DNA. He strongly believed that DNA was the template for RNA, and that RNA was the template for proteins. But as he drifted to sleep, he realized that he hadn’t gotten any closer to the secret of DNA over the last year. He and Crick discussed it once in awhile, but they mostly focused on their separate research. Otherwise, Watson spent plenty of time discussing girls with Peter Pauling. One day, however, Linus Pauling sent his son a letter declaring that he’d figured out the structure of DNA. Crick and Watson initially declared that they should try to figure out the structure, too, and publish it at the same time as Pauling—but they quickly started to lose hope.
Watson had just rejected Crick’s offer to start working together again on DNA, but he was also clearly fixated on it. Both Crick and Watson still felt a sense of curiosity and wonder at DNA, which they believed could unlock the secrets of genetics, heredity, and identity. And they both knew that their time was limited, because someone would eventually solve the secret of DNA. Therefore, Linus Pauling’s letter was a rude wake-up call: it suggested that by following Bragg’s orders and suppressing their own curiosity, they had probably given up their only chance to discover the secret of life.
Themes
