Fifty years of the double helix

Science: Anniversaries inevitably provide a great opportunity for publishers

Science: Anniversaries inevitably provide a great opportunity for publishers. The passage of 10, 20, 50 years from a momentous event allows authors to rush back to these episodes to restate, rehash and sometimes reconstitute history. For this reason the media is currently awash with celebratory articles and books on the 50th anniversary of the discovery of DNA's double helix shape, writes Dick Ahlstrom.

The media can hardly criticise this, given that we ourselves are involved in the DNA festivities. Happily for the reader, the scientific effort involved in finally deciphering DNA's chemical shape also threw up a terrific story of competitive bickering, intrigue, damaged reputations and unacknowledged contributions.

These two books offer all the detail the uninvolved reader might ever want about the months in the run-up to the discovery itself on February 28th, 1953 or its announcement a few weeks later in the leading science journal, Nature, on April 25th of that same year. The two books describe how James Watson and Francis Crick finally made the discovery. The decider between the two is how much work one might be willing to expend in gaining that information.

By way of clarification, DNA is the genetic information - tightly folded and smaller than a full stop on this page - packed into each and every cell in our bodies. It is a code billions of steps long that provides the recipes used by the cells to produce essential proteins needed for life.

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It tells cells how to grow into brain, kidney or muscle cells, tells them when to multiply and tells them when to die. It is profoundly complex, yet its entire sequence was mapped a few short years ago in the international Human Genome Project.

While most sixth-year biology pupils could now describe DNA's helical shape, this wasn't determined before 1953. Small numbers of scientists on either side of the Atlantic were at the time in a race to crack its structure and become the first to tell the world. These two publications provide a wealth of information about how that discovery was made.

Watson's own account, written with Andrew Berry, has the edge both in terms of access (neither Watson nor his family provided interviews for the McElheny book) and in terms of flash. His is a swish production filled with beautiful colour illustrations, cartoons, graphics and pictures. It is also wonderfully written, one assumes because of the guiding hand of Berry.

All the effort is explained when one realises that the book is an accompaniment to a Channel Four series on the discovery of the double helix. It is an ideal primer for the reader who feels a need to learn more about DNA on this anniversary, a solid coffee-table book that will impress the uninitiated.

The production, however, doesn't reveal a great deal more about the days before February 28th, 1953 than was previously known, other than for the DNA anorak. Watson has already had a great opportunity to put his version on the record in his seminal 1968 publication, The Double Helix: A Personal Account of the Discovery of the Structure of DNA.

So the Watson/Berry book provides a palatable way to catch up on history with the added advantage that it comes from the horse's mouth. The book also then takes the reader forward into what followed, both for Watson during his time at Cold Spring Harbour research labs in the US, and for DNA, which went on to become famous in genetic fingerprinting, genetically modified food products, new drugs and medical therapies, and Dolly the cloned sheep.

What chance then for Victor McElheny's book, which essentially tells the same story with the same facts but without the benefit of direct interviews with the great man himself? It would seem an unfair fight, but in fact McElheny provides a different kind of service.

He was not party to the events and so has the benefit of standing free of the need to justify past decisions, explain omissions or skirt around personality clashes. Unfortunately the book suffers from a narrative deficit - the writing style tends to be burdensome. It struggles under the weight of information that McElheny wants to share with his readers.

There are several dozen pages of "notes" pointing the reader towards footnoted references in the text. Sentences are chopped up in indexed quotes described in the notes and parsed into information nuggets that give the narrative a kind of stuttering effect. He has also chosen to refer to his two main subjects as Jim and Francis, something that seems a bit impertinent despite the fact that he knew Watson personally.

Yet his book has merit. He provides a suitably pacey run-up to the actual discovery and then continues the tale of Watson as he moves on to the Human Genome Project. While it challenges the casual reader with an information overload, this very attribute should make it the reference work for those involved in academic studies of Watson, Crick and the elucidation of DNA. One gets the impression that the author has left nothing out and so, for those with a predilection for the minutiae of this historical event, McElheny is your only man.

Dick Ahlstrom is Science Editor of The Irish Times

DNA: The Secret of Life. By James Watson with Andrew Berry, William Heinemann, 446pp, £20

Watson and DNA: Making a Scientific Revolution By Victor K. McElheny. Wiley, 365pp, £18.99