Genes, Girls and Gamow
OUP £18.99, pp275
Jim Watson is, if nothing else, an awkward cuss, albeit a talented one. Famed for unravelling the structure of DNA, for which he shared a Nobel Prize with his Cambridge co-worker, Francis Crick, in 1962, Watson also produced the magnificent Double Helix, his racy account of the pair's breakthrough. The book, which became a milestone in popular science writing, reveals Watson as an engaging, brash, ambitious, over-sexed, jovial opportunist.
Then there is his dark side, the Jim Watson observed by EO Wilson at Harvard a few years later and who is recalled in his autobiography, Naturalist. To the great environmental biologist, Watson was simply 'the most unpleasant human being' he had ever met, the 'Caligula of biology' who disdained anyone who studied living things at anything other than a genetic level. Watson 'was the fast young gun who rode into town' and nearly wrecked biological studies at America's most august university.
If taken at face value, these two accounts suggest something fairly radical must have happened to 'Honest Jim' Watson between Cambridge and Harvard, raising hopes for this, the second part of his own story, which follows his career during this key period between 1962 and 1968 when Watson worked, unhappily, at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech).
And in one sense, Genes, Girls and Gamow does deliver, churning out endless supplies of gossipy titbits about the rich and famous he encountered then. Indeed, it is startling how many luminaries Watson met in these few, callow years, although clearly this is no faint heart encumbered by feelings of inadequacy in the presence of the great. At one scientific banquet, 'Dick Feynman and I sat next to each other,' he remembers. 'Although we could not say it to others, we felt we might be Caltech's most obvious candidates for future Nobel awards.' The fact that both were so honoured a few years later doesn't stop you wanting to kick the author smartly up the scientific slats.
Other famous Watson sidekicks include Alan Turing, whose maths 'was unlikely to help biologists'; the great physicist turned biologist, George Gamow, whose card tricks and ultimately lethal drinking enlivened so many Watson parties; and author Naomi Mitchison, who seems to have spent much of her time consoling the emotional biologist following his regular dumpings by girlfriends.
In fact, the book is divided cleanly between the efforts of the testosterone-fuelled, romantically inept, jug-eared Lothario to find a 'popsy' who will sleep with him regularly and by his rambling accounts of his sporadic bouts of work, these being aimed at deciphering the way in which DNA is decoded into proteins in our bodies. By the end of the book, Watson has succeeded at neither, both goals being resolved only in a lengthy epilogue that trails off somewhere in the 1970s. Watson meets and marries his present wife, Liz, while it is left to Crick, working with Sidney Brenner, to unravel the way in which DNA controls our cells.
Not that these chronological letdowns really matter. What really damns the book is its madcap, vague, rambling nature and its total lack of focus. The science is so patchy and obscure as to be unintelligible, while not even a biographical list of the book's 90 main characters makes it possible to follow the Byzantine nature of their intrigues or to make them interesting. In the end, the Watson enigma remains as opaque as ever, which is perhaps just as well.