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Chapter 21
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
For the rest of the year, Linus Pauling didn’t reveal anything more about his DNA experiments. So, Crick and Watson started to hope that maybe Pauling didn’t truly have the right structure figured out. In London, Maurice Wilkins told Watson that Rosalind Franklin was finally leaving his lab and stopping her research on DNA. Then, Peter Pauling got another letter in January: his father had written up his results and would be sending a copy to Cambridge. In fact, he sent two—one to his son and one to Sir Lawrence Bragg. Bragg decided not to show it to Crick, so as not to distract him from his thesis, but Peter showed Watson and Crick his copy.
As their rivals pushed ahead with DNA research, Crick and Watson struggled to figure out if and how they could contribute to it. Again, Peter Pauling’s influence on them was absolutely crucial—although he didn’t give them new ideas, he kept them informed about his father. In fact, Crick and Watson likely would have never returned to DNA research if Peter hadn’t shown them his father’s research. This again shows that even when major scientific discoveries seem like works of individual genius, they may actually depend on unlikely relationships and even total coincidences.
Themes
Peter Pauling explained that his father modeled DNA as “a three-chain helix with the sugar-phosphate backbone in the center”—almost exactly what Watson and Crick thought a year before. But when Watson studied Linus Pauling’s diagrams, he realized that there was a major problem. In his model, Pauling neutralized the phosphate groups’ negative charges with an extra hydrogen atom. But according to the rules of basic chemistry, this never happens—after all, it would mean that DNA is neutrally charged, not an acid. Pauling might have been challenging the basic principles of chemical theory, but more likely, he just made a huge mistake.
In the early 1950s, Linus Pauling was easy the most influential chemist in the world. Crick and Watson depended on Pauling’s book during their first attempt to model DNA, and Watson felt incredibly honored to meet him at the International Biochemistry Congress in Paris. Therefore, it makes sense that Crick and Watson were totally astonished at Pauling’s basic oversight. In fact, this oversight showed Crick and Watson that they were just as capable as their idols: if they could make the same errors as Pauling, then they could also surely make great discoveries like him, too.
Themes
Watson started running around Cambridge to talk with other colleagues—and all of them agreed that Pauling was wrong. Meanwhile, Crick tried to persuade John Kendrew and Max Perutz to let him work on DNA again. He and Watson wanted to find the structure before Pauling could identify and correct his error. Watson planned to show Maurice Wilkins the manuscript a few days later in London. But first, he and Crick celebrated Pauling’s mistake with a drink at their favorite pub, the Eagle.
Readers might consider Watson and Crick mean-spirited for celebrating Pauling’s blunder, especially since his work had been such an inspiration to them. Of course, they were really celebrating the fact that they would have more time to study DNA. Similarly, while informing Pauling about his mistake might have been the right ethical choice, Crick and Watson were clearly more interested in discovering DNA for themselves.
Themes
