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Chapter 23
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 Cavendish Laboratory the next morning, Watson told Max Perutz and Sir Lawrence Bragg about Maurice Wilkins and Rosalind Franklin’s “B” form of DNA. Watson explained that he wanted to beat Linus Pauling to the solution, and Bragg encouraged him. Watson ran downstairs and started putting in an order for new molecular models. Then, Crick arrived. He reported on the success of his dinner party with Watson’s sister Elizabeth and the handsome French student Bertrand Fourcade. But Watson quickly turned the conversation to the “B” form. Crick was intrigued—although, while Watson favored a two-chain model, Crick suggested that two- and three-chain models were equally likely.
As Franklin’s experimental evidence brought Crick and Watson closer to a solution, they finally got Bragg’s permission to work on DNA. Of course, Bragg had a longstanding, friendly rivalry with Pauling—so he also wanted to reach the solution first. At last, Crick and Watson had proven that they were more likely to actually get there than to embarrass the lab. And, at last, they finally returned to a level of excitement and intensity that they hadn’t reached since building their first, unsuccessful DNA model. Still, they had many questions left to answer—including basic ones, like the number of chains in the DNA molecule.
Themes
Watson and Crick kept working on their usual research for three more days, while they waited for their molecular models. Meanwhile, Watson also went to dinner with Elizabeth, Bertrand Fourcade, and Peter Pauling (who talked about girls, as usual).
Even if Crick and Watson were racing against the clock, there were still practical limits to their research. Socializing with their colleagues (and with women) was another component of their lives as academics.
Themes
When the first molecular models were ready, Watson started trying to put together a two-chain model of DNA. For the first day and a half, he put the sugar-phosphate backbone in the center and the nitrogenous bases on the outside, but he couldn’t come up with a viable model. He knew that the opposite could also work: the backbone could be outside and the bases inside. But if this was true, there would be a practically infinite range of viable solutions. He started tinkering around with this form, and by the end of the week, he was making progress.
Even though Watson and Crick had better data and new insights about DNA, they couldn’t deduce very much about its structure with certainty. Instead, they began modeling it through a process of trial and error. They had no guarantee that their strategy would work, and they could have always found new flaws in their model, which would have eliminated whatever limited progress they had already made.
Themes
Over the weekend, Crick and Watson went to a party. Then, they hosted Maurice Wilkins, who said he was waiting until Rosalind Franklin left to begin working with molecular models—but wouldn’t mind if Crick and Watson started doing the same in the meantime.
Because Wilkins had worked so closely with Crick and Watson for so long, he was somewhere between an ally and a rival. Surely, Wilkins’s research into DNA structure would have raised many more difficult ethical questions for Crick and Watson if they hadn’t been close to a solution before he even started.
Themes
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