Academic Life and the University Theme Analysis

The Double Helix isn’t just the tale of a landmark scientific discovery—it’s also a coming-of-age story. At just 22 years old, James Watson left his home in the U.S. to do biology research on a fellowship in Copenhagen. Little did he know that he’d end up spending most of a decade working at the University of Cambridge in England—and become a world-famous scientist in the process. Thus, the years that Watson chronicles in this book were also important years of personal growth for him. If his PhD taught him what it meant to do serious scholarly work, then his years at Cambridge taught him what it meant to live a serious scholarly life. In The Double Helix, Watson celebrates the privileges that this scholarly life gave him, particularly in the unique, cloistered environment of Cambridge. The most significant of these privileges is academic freedom. But several other material privileges made genuine academic freedom possible for people like Watson (white men working in American and European universities in the 1950s). Throughout his book, Watson celebrates the privileges he received—which included generous fellowships, elite connections, and the opportunity to travel widely. But he also celebrates rigid gender roles that made it extremely difficult for women to pursue a scholarly career and gave men power over them in every sphere of life. Twenty-first-century readers may notice that many aspects of university life have changed since Watson’s time at Cambridge—some for better and some for worse. Still, in The Double Helix, Watson shows how universities make scholarly life and work possible by creating the day-to-day infrastructure and environment necessary to meet academics’ needs.

When Watson left the U.S. and began his scientific career, he started to understand both the great value of academic freedom and the way that freedom is conditional on institutional support. Watson began in Copenhagen, where he received a $3,000-a-year fellowship to study biochemistry at Herman Kalckar’s lab. But he soon realized that he only needed $1,000 a year to live in Copenhagen, and at first, the Fellowship Board didn’t know if he was studying with Kalckar at all. Instead, he went to study bacteriophages with Ole Maaløe, and then he moved to Cambridge to study DNA. In the process, he recognized the value of academic freedom, which let him control his time and work. However, Watson then experienced an about-face: when he finally informed the Fellowship Board that he had left Kalckar’s lab, he temporarily lost his funding. Through this experience, he learned that academic freedom is as conditional as it is valuable. Therefore, he set about looking for a middle ground: to receive funding, he needed to prove that his research was appropriate for him and useful to the world, but he also wanted the luxury to experiment with new ideas. This is how he ended up earning funding at Cambridge, where he was technically supposed to study plant viruses but actually spent much of his time learning about DNA. Thus, Watson’s experience showed him that academic freedom is only possible within certain limits—which institutions like universities and the fellowship board were responsible for setting.

Watson soon decided that the University of Cambridge was an ideal site for an academic life—pleasant, comfortable, and intellectually stimulating, it allowed scholars to take full advantage of their academic freedom. The first thing that Watson noticed about Cambridge was its architecture. He writes that “I had never seen such beautiful buildings in all my life, and any hesitation I might have had about leaving my safe life as a biologist vanished.” For Watson, then, Cambridge’s cloistered beauty represented the comfort and serenity of a scholarly life. But Cambridge also gave Watson everything he needed to survive and free his time for intellectual pursuits. He spends much of the book discussing the different places he stayed and his search for a good meal. While he wished for better heating and tastier food, he always managed to rent a room and never had to cook, and he points out that these luxuries allowed him to dedicate all of his energy to science. Finally, Watson sees Cambridge’s social scene as its most important advantage. He was surrounded by brilliant, renowned researchers, and famous biologists frequently visited the university to present their work. This stimulated his thinking and improved his research.

But Watson also emphasizes another aspect of Cambridge’s social scene: the parties and the access to women. Some readers might find it disturbing that Watson constantly tried (and consistently failed) to meet undergraduate women. (So did Watson’s collaborator Francis Crick, even though he was 12 years older than Watson—and already married.) In fact, Watson clearly views the restrictions put on women as a critical part of Cambridge’s appeal. For instance, he appreciated that Crick’s wife, Odile, cooked well but didn’t know anything about science—and he hoped to find a similar wife for himself. Similarly, Watson’s constant negative comments about feminism and Rosalind Franklin—whose appearance and demeanor he saw as unwomanlike—show that he simply doesn’t believe that women should be equal to men in the university. Rather, he envisions a system in which male scholars do intellectual work while women their wives, secretaries, and female students cater to their needs. In other words, Watson celebrates men’s academic freedom in the universities of the 1950s because it was conditioned on women’s oppression. Thus, while Watson shows how universities can unleash scholars’ potential by giving them academic freedom and meeting their material needs, he also inadvertently shows his readers how this version of the university is severely limited: it protects some people’s right to academic freedom only by denying that right to others.