The double helix by james watson pdf download

Not forgetting the 'lost heroes' who fought to prove that DNA is the stuff of genes, only to be airbrushed out of history. He tells the story of DNA in the round, from its discovery in pus-soaked bandages in to the aftermath of Watson's best-seller The Double Helix a century later. You don't need to be a scientist to enjoy this book. It's a page-turner that unfolds like a detective story, with suspense, false leads and treachery, and a fabulous cast of noble heroes and back-stabbing villains.

But beware: some of the science is dreadful, and the heroes and villains may not be the ones you expect. However, since DNA is an unusual substance, we are not hesitant in being bold' By elucidating the structure of DNA, the molecule underlying all life, Francis Crick and James Watson revolutionised biochemistry. At the time, Watson was only His uncompromisingly honest account of those heady days lifts the lid on the real world of great scientists, with their very human faults and foibles, their petty rivalries and driving ambition.

Above all, he captures the extraordinary excitement of their desperate efforts to beat their rivals at King's College to the solution to one of the great enigmas of the life sciences. It was the experimental work of Wilkins and his colleague Rosalind Franklin that provided the clues to the structure.

Here, Wilkins, who died in , gives us his own account of his life, his early work in physics, the tensions and exhilaration of working on DNA, and his much discussed difficult relationship with his colleague Rosalind.

This is a highly readable, and often moving account from a highly distinguished scientist who played one of the key roles in the historic discovery of the molecule behind inheritance. Combining scientific exposition with stories of criminal investigations, scientific and legal hubris, and distortions on all sides, Kaye shows how the adversary system exacerbated divisions among scientists, how lawyers and experts obfuscated some issues and clarified others, how probability and statistics were manipulated and misunderstood, and how the need to convince lay judges influenced the scientific research.

Looking to the future, Kaye uses probability theory to clarify legal concepts of relevance and probative value, and describes alternatives to race-based DNA profile frequencies.

Essential reading for lawyers, judges, and expert witnesses in DNA cases, The Double Helix and the Law of Evidence is an informative and provocative contribution to the interdisciplinary study of law and science.

The author explains evolution--from Darwin to DNA to genetic engineering--and renders comprehensible the quantum roots of molecular biology.

Aware that his father is unhappy with him taking the job with Dr. Wyatt at Wyatt Transgenics, Eli takes on his new work with enthusiasm until he begins to uncover the connection between his employer, his family, and his mother's Huntington's disease. Worst of all, now his father has gone missing, which prompts Aunt Marisol, his number one protector, to leave the ship in search of him.

The story of Rosalind's work on the project, and her bitterness with Maurice for having given her data to Watson and Crick withouther permission, is a well-known one, and has recently been brought once again into the spotlight by Brenda Maddox's biography published in Now, for the first time, Maurice Wilkins tells his side of the story, showing that it is not as simple as it has sometimes been portrayed. A Book by James D. Watson,Alexander Gann,Jan Witkowski.

A Book by James Watson. An Autobiography by Maurice Wilkins. A Book by R. After the Double Helix by James D. All the time Watson was only twenty-four, a young zoologist hungry to make his mark. His uncompromisingly honest account of the heady days of their thrilling sprint against other world-class researchers to solve one of sciences' greatest unsolved mysteries gives a dazzlingly clear picture of a world of scientists with great gifts, very human ambitions, and bitter rivalries.

With humility unspoiled by false modesty, Watson relates his and Crick's desperate efforts to beat Linus Pauling to the identification of the basic building block of life.

Access-restricted-item true Addeddate Join over At the time, Watson was only twenty-four, a young scientist hungry to make his mark. Never has a scientist been so truthful in capturing in words the flavor of his work. Now completely up-to-date with the latest research advances, the Seventh Edition retains the distinctive character of earlier editions. Twenty-two concise chapters, co-authored by six highly distinguished biologists, provide current, authoritative coverage of an exciting, fast-changing discipline.

In his memoir, The Double Helix Readers Union, , the brash young scientist James Watson chronicled the drama of the race to identify the structure of DNA, a discovery that would usher in the era of modern molecular biology. After half a century, the implications of the double helix keep rippling.

The double helix; the blueprint of life; and, during the early s, a baffling enigma that could win a Nobel Prize. Several of them had been absolutely vital in generously providing him with samples of highly purified DNA. It was bad enough learning crystallography without having to acquire the witchcraft-like techniques of the biochemist. On the other hand, the majority weren't like the high-powered types he had worked with on the bomb project.

Sometimes they seemed even ignorant of the way DNA was important. But even so they knew more than the majority of biologists.

In England, if not everywhere, most botanists and zoologists were a muddled lot. Not even the possession of University Chairs gave many the assurance to do clean science; some actually wasted their efforts on useless polemics about the origin of life or how we know that a scientific fact is really correct. What was worse, it was possible to get a university degree in biology without learning any genetics. That was not to say that the geneticists themselves provided any intellectual help.

You would have thought that with all their talk about genes they should worry about what they were. Yet almost none of them seemed to take seriously the evidence that genes were made of DNA. This fact was unnecessarily chemical. All that most of them wanted out of life was to set their students onto uninterpretable details of chromosome behavior or to give elegantly phrased, fuzzy-minded speculations over the wireless on topics like the role of the geneticist in this transitional age of changing values.

So the knowledge that the phage group took DNA seriously made Maurice hope that times would change and he would not have painfully to explain, each time he gave a seminar, why his lab was making so much fuss and bother about DNA.

By the time our dinner was finished, he was clearly in a mood to push ahead. Y et all too suddenly Rosy popped back into the conversation, and the possibility of really mobilizing his lab's efforts slowly I receded as we paid the bill and went out into the night. From there we were to go up to Oxford to spend the weekend.

Francis wanted to talk to Dorothy Hodgkin, the best of the English crystallographers, while I welcomed the opportunity to see Oxford for the first time. At the train gate Francis was in top form. The visit would give him the opportunity to tell Dorothy about his success with Bill Cochran in working out the helical diffraction theory.

The theory was much too elegant not to be told in person individuals like Dorothy who were clever enough to understand its power immediately were much too rare.

As soon as we were in the train carriage, Francis began asking questions about Rosy's talk. My answers were frequently vague, and Francis was visibly annoyed by my habit of always trusting to memory and never writing anything on paper.

If a subject interested me, I could usually recollect what I needed. This time, however, we were in trouble, because I did not know enough of the crystallographic jargon.

Particularly unfortunate was my failure to be able to report exactly the water content of the DNA samples upon which Rosy had done her measurements.

The possibility existed that I might be misleading Francis by an order of magnitude difference. The wrong person had been sent to hear Rosy.

If Francis had gone along, no such ambiguity would have existed. It was the penalty for being oversensitive to the situation. For, admittedly, the sight of Francis mulling over the consequences of Rosy's information when it was hardly out of her mouth would have upset Maurice. In one sense it would be grossly unfair for them to learn the facts at the same time.

Certainly Maurice should have the first chance to come to grips with the problem. On the other hand, there seemed no indication that he thought the answer would come from playing with molecular models.

Of course, the possibility existed that he was keeping something back. But that was very unlikely Maurice just wasn't that type. The only thing that Francis could do immediately was to seize the water value, which was the easiest to think, about. Soon something appeared to make sense, and he began scribbling on the vacant back sheet of a manuscript, he had been reading. By then I could not understand what Francis was up to and reverted to The Times for amusement.

Within a few minutes, however, Francis made me lose all interest in the outside world by telling me that only a small number of formal solutions were compatible both with the Cochran Crick theory and with Rosy's experimental data. Quickly he began to draw more diagrams to show me how simple the problem was. Though the mathematics eluded me, the crux of the matter was not difficult to follow.

Decisions had to be made about the number of polynucleotide chains within the DNA molecule. Superficially, the X- ray data were compatible with two, three, or four strands. It was all a question of the angle and radii at which the DNA strands twisted about the central axis. By the time the hour and a half train journey was over, Francis saw no reason why we should not know the answer soon. Perhaps a week of solid fiddling wi1h the molecular models would be necessary to make us absolutely sure we had the right answer.

Then it would be obvious to the world that Pauling was not the only one capable of true insight into how biological molecules were, constructed. About a year before that triumph, Bragg, Kendrew, and Perutz had published a systematic paper on the conformation of the polypeptide chain, an attack that missed the point.

Bragg in fact was still bothered by the fiasco. It hurt his pride at a tender point. There had been previous encounters with Pauling, stretching over a twenty-five-year interval. All too often Linus had got there first. Even Francis was somewhat humiliated by the event. He was already' in the Cavendish when Bragg had become keen about how a polypeptide chain folded up. Moreover, he was privy to a discussion in which the fundamental blunder about the shape of the peptide bond was made.

That had certainly been the occasion to interject his critical facility in assessing the meaning of experimental observations but he had said nothing useful. In other instances he had been annoyingly candid in pointing out where Perutz and Bragg had publicly over interpreted their hemoglobin results. This open criticism was certainly behind Sir Lawrence's recent outburst against him. In Bragg's view, all that Crick did was, to rock the boat.

Now, however, was not the time to concentrate on past mistakes. Instead, the speed with which we talked about possible types of DNA structures gathered intensity as the morning went by. No matter in whose company we found ourselves, Francis would quickly survey the progress of the past few hours, bringing our listener up to date on how we had decided upon models in which the sugar-phosphate backbone was in the center of the molecule.

Only in that way would it be possible to obtain a structure regular enough to give the crystalline diffraction patterns observed by Maurice and Rosy. True, we had yet to deal with the irregular sequence of the bases that faced the outside but this difficulty right vanish in the wash when the correct internal arrangement was located. There was also the problem of what neutralized the negative charges of the phosphate groups of the DNA backbone.

Francis, as well as 1, knew almost nothing about how inorganic ions were arranged in three dimensions. We had to face the bleak situation that the world authority on the structural chemistry of ions was Linus Pauling himself. Thus if the crux of the problem was to deduce an unusually clever arrangement of inorganic ions and phosphate groups, we were clearly at a disadvantage. By midday it became imperative to locate a copy of Pauling's classic book, The Nature of the Chemical Bond.

Then we were having lunch near High Street. Wasting no time over coffee, we dashed into several bookstores until success came in Blackwell's. A rapid reading was made of the relevant sections. This produced the correct values for the exact sizes of the candidate inorganic ions, but nothing that could help push the problem over the top. Francis ran through the helical theory itself, devoting only a few minutes to our progress with DNA.

Most of the conversation centered instead on Dorothy's recent work with insulin. We then moved on to Magdalen, where we were to have tea with Avrion Mitchison and Leslie Orgel, both then fellows of the college. Over cakes Francis was ready to talk about trivial things, while I quietly thought how splendid it would be if I could some day live in the style of a Magdalen don.

Dinner with claret, however, restored the conversation to our impending triumph with DNA. By then we had been joined by Francis' close friend, the logician George Kreisel, whose unwashed appearance and idiom did not fit into my picture of the English philosopher. Francis greeted his arrival with great gusto, and the sound of Francis' laughter and Kreisel's Austrian accent dominated the spiffy 'atmosphere of the restaurant along High Street at which Kreisel had directed us to meet him.

For a while Kreisel held forth on a way to make a financial killing by shifting money between the politically divided parts of Europe. Avrion Mitchison then rejoined us, and the conversation for a short time reverted to the casual banter of the intellectual middle class. This sort of small talk, however, was not Kreisel's meat, and so Avrion and I excused ourselves to walk along the medieval streets toward my lodgings.

By then I was pleasantly drunk and spoke at length of what we could do when we had DNA. A more detailed view of the bivalent bonds of the sugar-phosphate backbone. Elizabeth appeared delighted that success was almost within our grasp, while John took the news more calmly. When it came out that Francis was again in an inspired, mood and I had nothing more solid to report than enthusiasm, he became lost to the sections of The Times which spoke about the first days of the new Tory government.

Soon afterward, John went off to his rooms in Peterhouse, leaving Elizabeth and me to digest the implications of my unanticipated luck.

I did not remain long, since the sooner I could get back to the lab, the quicker we could find out which of the several possible answers would be favored by a hard look at the molecular models themselves.

Both Francis and 1, however, knew that the models in the Cavendish would not be completely satisfactory. They had been constructed by John some eighteen months before, for the work on the three-dimensional shape of the polypeptide chain. There existed no accurate representations of the groups of atoms unique to DNA. Neither phosphorus atoms nor the purine and pyrimidine bases were on hand.

Rapid improvisation would be necessary since there was no time for Max to give a rush order for their construction. Making brand new models might take all of a week, whereas an answer was possible within a day or so. Thus as soon as I got to the lab I began adding bits of copper wire to some of our carbon atom models, thereby changing them into the larger sized phosphorus atoms.

A schematic view of a nucleotide, showing that the plane of the base is almost perpendicular to the plane in which most of the sugar atoms lie. This important fact was established in by S. Furberg, then working in London at J. Bernal's Birkbeck College lab. Later he built some very tentative models for DNA, but not knowing the details of the King's College experiments, he built only single-stranded structures, and so his structural ideas were never seriously considered in the Cavendish.

Much more difficulty came from the necessity to fabricate representations of the inorganic ions. Unlike the other constituents, they obeyed no simpleminded rules telling us the angles at which they would form their respective chemical bonds. Most likely we had to know the correct DNA structure before the right models could be made. I maintained the hope, however, that Francis might already be on to the vital trick and would immediately blurt it out when he got to the lab.

Over eighteen hours had passed since our last conversation, and there was little chance that the Sunday papers would have distracted him upon his return to the Green Door. His tenish entrance, however, did not bring the answer. After Sunday supper he had again run through the dilemma but saw no quick answer.

The problem was then put aside for a rapid scanning of a novel on the sexual misjudgments of Cambridge dons. The book had its brief good moments, and even in its most ill-conceived pages there was the question of whether any of their friends' lives had been seriously drawn on in the construction of the plot.

Over morning coffee Francis nonetheless exuded confidence that enough experimental data might already be on hand to determine the outcome. We might be able to start the game with several completely different sets of facts and yet always hit the same final answers. Perhaps the whole problem would fall out just by our concentrating on the prettiest way for a polynucleotide chain to fold up. So while Francis continued thinking about the meaning of the X-ray diagram, I began to assemble the various atomic models into several chains, each several nucleotides in length.

Though in nature DNA chains are very long, there was no reason to put together anything massive. As long as we could be sure it was a helix, the assignment of the positions for only a couple of nucleotides automatically generated the arrangement of all the other components. The routine assembly task was over by one, when Francis and I walked over to the Eagle for our habitual lunch with the chemist Herbert Gutfreund.

These days John usually went to Peterhouse, while Max always cycled home. Occasionally John's student Hugh Huxley would join us, but of late he was finding it difficult to enjoy Francis' inquisitive lunchtime attacks.

For just prior to my arrival in Cambridge, Hugh's decision to take up the problem of how muscles contract had focused Francis' attention on the unforeseen opportunity that, for twenty years or so, muscle physiologists had been accumulating data without tying them into a se1fconsistentr picture.

Francis found it a perfect situation for action. There was no need for him to ferret out the relevant experiments since Hugh had already waded through the undigested mass.

Lunch after lunch, the facts were put together to form theories which held for a day or so, until Hugh could convince Francis that a result he would like ascribed to experimental error was as solid as the Rock of Gibraltar. Now the construction of Hugh's X-ray camera was completed, and soon he hoped to get experimental evidence to settle the debatable points.

The fun would be all lost if somehow Francis could correctly predict what he was going to find. But there was no need that day for Hugh to fear a new intellectual invasion. When we walked into the Eag1e, Francis did not exchange his usual raucous greetings with the Persian economist Ephraim Eshag, but gave the distilled impression that something serious was up.

The actual model building would start right after lunch, and more concrete plans must be formulated to make the process efficient so over our gooseberry pie we looked at the pros and cons of one, two, three, and four chains, quickly dismissing one chain helices as incompatible with the evidence in our hands.

Admittedly there was no evidence that Rosy's samples contained any divalent ions, and so we might be sticking our necks out. On the other hand, there was absolutely no evidence against our hunch. If only the King's groups had thought about models, they would have asked which salt was present and we would not be placed in this tiresome position. But, with luck, the addition of magnesium or possibly calcium ions to the sugar-phosphate backbone would quickly generate an elegant structure, the correctness of which would not be debatable.

Our first minutes with the mode1s, though, were not joyous. Even though only about fifteen atoms were involved, they kept falling out of the awkward pincers setup to hold them the correct distance from one another. Even worse, the uncomfortable impression arose that there were no obvious restrictions on the bond angles between several of the most important atoms.

This was not at all nice. To our annoyance, there seemed every reason to believe that the phospho- diester bonds which bound together the successive nucleotides in DNA might exist in a variety of shapes. At least with our level of chemical intuition, there was unlikely to be any single conformation much prettier than the rest. After tea, however, a shape began to emerge which brought back our spirits.

This was a feature demanded by Maurice's and Rosy's pictures, so Francis was visibly reassured as he stepped back from the lab bench and surveyed the afternoon's effort. Admittedly a few of the atomic contacts were still too close for comfort, but, after all, the fiddling had just begun. With a few hours' more work, a presentable model should be on display. Ebullient spirits prevailed during the evening meal at the Green Door. Though Odile could not follow what we were saying, she was obviously cheered by the fact that Francis was about to bring off his second triumph within the month.

If this course of events went on, they would soon be rich and could own a car. At no moment did Francis see any point in trying to simplify the matter for Odile's benefit. Ever since she had told him that gravity went only three miles into the sky, this aspect of their relationship was set.

Not only did she not know any science, but any attempt to put some in her head would be a losing fight against the years of her convent upbringing. The most to hope for was an appreciation of the linear way in which money was measured. Our conversation instead centered upon a young art student then about to Marry Odile's friend Harmut Weil. This capture was mildly displeasing to Francis. It was about to remove the prettiest girl from their party circle. Moreover, there was more than one thing cloudy about Harmut.

He had come out of a German university tradition that believed in dueling. There was also his undeniable skill in persuading numerous Cambridge women to pose for his camera.

All thought of women, however, was banished by the time Francis breezed into the lab just before morning coffee. Soon, when several atoms had been pushed in or out, the three-chain model began to look quite reasonable. The next obvious step would be to check it with Rosy's quantitative measurements. The model would certainly fit with the general locations of the X-ray reflections, for its essential helical parameters had been chosen to fit the seminar facts I had conveyed to Francis.

If it were right, however, the model would also accurately predict the relative intensities of the various X-ray reflections. A quick phone call was made to Maurice.

Francis explained how the helical diffraction theory allowed a rapid survey of possible DNA models, and that he and I had just come up with a creature which might be the answer we were all awaiting. The best thing would be for Maurice immediately to come and look it over. But Maurice gave no definite date, saying he thought he might make it sometime within the week. Soon after the phone was putdown, John came in to see how Maurice had taken the news of the breakthrough.

Francis found it hard to sum up his reply. It was almost as if Maurice were indifferent to what we were doing.

In the midst of further fiddling that afternoon, a call came through from King's. Maurice would come up on the train from London the following morning.

Moreover, he would not be alone. His collaborator Willy Seeds would also come. Even more to the point was that Rosy, together with her student R. Gosling, would be on the same train. Apparently they were still interested in the answer.

Ordinarily he would have come by bus, but now there were four of them to share the cost. Moreover, there would be no satisfaction in waiting at the bus stop with Rosy.

It would make the present uncomfortable situation worse than it need be. His well intentioned remarks never came off, and even now, when the possibility of humiliation hung over them, Rosy was as indifferent as ever to his presence and directed all her attention to Gosling.

There was only the slightest effort made at a united appearance when Maurice poked his head into our lab to say they had come. Especially in sticky situations like this, Maurice thought that a few minutes without science was the way to proceed.