The bonding of base pairs
Nicholas Fearn
GENES, GIRLS AND GAMOW by J. D. Watson OUP, £18.99, pp. 304, ISBN 0198509766 1.
he words of this memoir's title do not come in order of priority for James Watson. The co-discovery of the structure of DNA may have made him one of the greatest scientists ever to have lived, but all he wanted to do, it seems, was meet the opposite sex. Upon winning the Nobel Prize, he rejoiced that he could cease pursuing language students and instead hit on the clever girls at Girton and Newnham. The indifference with which he was met will make depressing reading for anyone who dreams that their achievements will make up for their attributes.
The background for the narrative is the search for the structure of RNA, the 'messenger' molecule that manufactures proteins according to the instructions of DNA. The adventure does not translate well onto the page. Watson writes of celebrating after concocting a scheme whereby 'adenine-thymine (A-T) base pairs attract adenine. T-A bases bond to uracil, guanine-cytosine (G-C) base pairs attach guanine, and C-G base pairs bond cytosine'. Equally puzzling is the wit of Watson's friend George Gamow, a Russian giant with a 'zany' sense of humour fuelled by litres of whisky. His history is far more interesting than his practical jokes. As a quantum physicist he had at first been treated as a hero in his home country — one newspaper writing that 'a son of the working class has explained the tiniest piece of machinery in the world'. Unfortunately. in 1931, quantum mechanics was denounced as an enemy of dialectical materialism. After Gamow and his wife defected at a Belgian conference, Stalin ordered that no more Russians be allowed to attend international scientific meetings.
If one cannot share Watson's excitement, it is at least easier to understand his misery. Virtually every woman the author meets over the 17 years covered by the book is registered along with her eye colour, charm level and overall attractiveness. No woman is introduced without an account of her looks. This is the diary of a compulsive ogler, constantly thwarted. He buys a white
Chevrolet convertible only to find it upstaged by a fellow Caltech academic's Jaguar. Photographed for a Vogue magazine spread on success stories, he hopes that this will impress 'with it' American girls. But he realises that no girl doing biochemistry in Cambridge will ever see it — the only British scientist he knows who reads the magazine is Francis Crick. Too late he realises that 'good parties are for the amusement not the education of the fairer sex'.
The explanation, however, is simple. Likely it was not just the traditionalists who Watson offended by delivering lectures in unlaced tennis shoes and wearing a floppy sun-hat at night as well as during the day. 'My water pistol was also judged inappropriate,' he writes, 'even though I generally restricted its aim to a pretty girl from the South taking invertebrate lab work too seriously.' The renowned genius cannot understand why 'the most attractive girls' invariably opted for the course in invertebrate dissection rather than attend his own lectures on physiology. The effect upon him proves that when one's love life goes well all goes well, and when it goes badly all goes badly.
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