Genes, Girls, and Gamow: After the Double Helix - Hardcover

Watson, James D.

 
9780375412837: Genes, Girls, and Gamow: After the Double Helix
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 0375412832 ISBN 13: 9780375412837
Verlag: Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press, 2002

Inhaltsangabe

One of the discoverers of the structure of DNA describes the extraordinary aftermath of their DNA breakthrough as some of the world's greatest scientists--Linus Pauling, Richard Feynman, and George Gamov, among others--competed in the new world of molecular biology, while his own efforts took another path--to find true love. By the author of The Double Helix. 30,000 first printing.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

James D. Watson is president of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York. A member of the National Academy of Sciences and the Royal Society, he has received the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the National Medal of Science, and, with Francis Crick and Maurice Wilkins, the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for 1962.

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"The chase for the double-helical structure of DNA was an adventure story in the best sense. First, there was a pot of scientific gold to be found--possibly very soon. Second, among the explorers who raced to find it, there was much bravado, unexpected lapses of reason, and painful acceptances of the fates not going well. The early 1950s were not times to be cautious but rather to run fast whenever a path opened up--nuggets of gold might be lying exposed over the next hill. As one of the winners with a fortune much, much bigger than I ever dared hope for, I could not stop moving. There was more genetic loot to be located, and not joining in the further hunt would make me feel old." --from the preface
Immediately following the revolutionary discovery of the structure of DNA by James D. Watson and Francis Crick in 1953, the world of molecular biology was caught up in a gold rush. The goal: to uncover the secrets of life the newly elucidated molecule promised to reveal. Genes, Girls, and Gamow is James Watson's report on the amazing aftermath of the DNA breakthrough, picking up where his now-classic memoir The Double Helix leaves off.
Here are the collaborations and collisions of giants, not only Watson and Crick themselves, but also legions of others, including Linus Pauling (the greatest chemist of the day), Richard Feynman (the bongo-playing cynosure of Caltech), and especially George Gamow, the bearlike, whiskey-wielding Russian physicist, who had turned his formidable intellect to the field of genetics; with Gamow--an irrepressible prankster to boot--Watson would found the legendary RNA-Tie Club.
But Watson--at twenty-five already the winner of genetic research's greatestjackpot--is obsessed with another goal as well: to find love, and a wife equal to his unexpected fame. As he and an international cast of roguish young colleagues do important research they also compare notes and share complaints on the scarcity of eligible mates. And amid the feverish search for the role of the still mysterious RNA molecule, Watson's thoughts are seldom far from the supreme object of his affections, an enthralling Swarthmore coed named Christa, the daughter of the celebrated Harvard biologist Ernst Mayr.
Part scientific apprenticeship, part sentimental education, Genes, Girls, and Gamow is a penetrating revelation of how great science is accomplished. It is also a charmingly candid account of one young man's full range of ambitions.

Aus dem Klappentext

hase for the double-helical structure of DNA was an adventure story in the best sense. First, there was a pot of scientific gold to be found possibly very soon. Second, among the explorers who raced to find it, there was much bravado, unexpected lapses of reason, and painful acceptances of the fates not going well. The early 1950s were not times to be cautious but rather to run fast whenever a path opened up nuggets of gold might be lying exposed over the next hill. As one of the winners with a fortune much, much bigger than I ever dared hope for, I could not stop moving. There was more genetic loot to be located, and not joining in the further hunt would make me feel old. from the preface

Immediately following the revolutionary discovery of the structure of DNA by James D. Watson and Francis Crick in 1953, the world of molecular biology was caught up in a gold rush. The goal: to uncover the secrets of life the newly elucidated molecule promised to reveal. Genes,

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Chapter 1

Cambridge (England): April 1953

Although my hair was properly long and my accent toned to suggest almost an English origin, Odile Crick told me I had still far to go before I would look right walking along Cambridge's King's Parade, much less looking purposefully indolent in one of its college gardens. My appearance would not have mattered if I were the same as a month ago-an unkempt slender figure who said what I thought as opposed to what good manners required. But now that Francis Crick and I had given the world the double helix, Cambridge in its own quiet way was bound to ask what we looked like. The time had come to acquire at least one set of clothes that would go well with Francis's Edwardian elegance. I was not trusted to act alone and Odile accompanied me to the men's clothing shop across from the chapel of John's (the College). My ill-fitting American tweed jacket was thrown out and replaced by a blue blazer and associated gray trousers. They would much better express my new status as the co-winner of a very great scientific jackpot.

The DNA molecule we had found two months before-in March 1953-was far more beautiful than we ever anticipated. With the two polynucleotide chains held together by adenine-thymine and guanine-cytosine base pairs, DNA had the complementary structure needed for the gene to be exactly copied during chromosome replication. When 1953 started, finding out what genes look like and how they replicate were two of the three big unsolved problems in genetics. Seemingly coming from nowhere, Francis and I had now grasped both. At times I virtually had to pinch myself to prove that I was not in the middle of a wonderful dream. But I was not, and so the possibility existed of a grand slam in which Francis and I also worked out how genes provide the information to make proteins.

By the flip of a coin, our names in the original manuscript had the order Watson-Crick instead of Crick-Watson. So several Cambridge wags now could refer to our DNA model as the WC structure. They suspected that our golden helix would be found tainted and destined for dumping down the water-closet drain.

I had become monomaniacal about DNA only in 1951 when I had just turned 23 and as a postdoctoral fellow was temporarily in Naples attending a small May meeting on biologically important macromolecules. There I learned from a mid-thirtyish English physicist called Maurice Wilkins that DNA, if properly prepared, diffracts X-rays as if it were a highly organized crystal. The odds were thus good that DNA molecules (genes) themselves have highly regular structures that conceivably could be worked out over the next several years. Briefly I considered asking Wilkins if he would let me join his London lab at King's College on the Strand, but my attempts to talk with him after his lecture elicited no enthusiastic response and I dropped the idea.

Instead, through the intervention of Salvador Luria, my Ph.D. supervisor at Indiana University, I was taken on five months later at the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge to work with an English chemist, John Kendrew. He was helping the Austrian-born chemist Max Perutz lead a small research group supported by the Medical Research Council (MRC) called the "Unit for the Study of the Molecular Structure of Biological Systems." Started in 1947, its scientists used X-ray methods to work on the three-dimensional structures of the oxygen-carrying proteins hemoglobin and myoglobin. In going to join the group, I hoped to expand the attention of the unit to DNA, so that they would let me work on it, instead of a protein, once I had learned X-ray diffraction techniques.

My crystallographic career, however, would have likely soon aborted if Francis Crick had not been in the lab. From the moment I arrived, he treated me as if I was a much younger brother in need of help. Then 35 years old, Francis was effectively unknown outside Cambridge, having joined the unit only two years before. Already Francis's penchant for theory had made him a powerful addition to the team's protein-solving efforts. His first major success came soon after I arrived, when that October he helped work out the theory for diffraction from helical objects. Even so, Francis could not anticipate a long-term future within the unit, because the week before he had badly upset the head of the Cavendish Laboratory, Sir Lawrence Bragg, by arguing that he, not Bragg, first saw a potential new way of analyzing protein X-ray diffraction patterns. To say the least, Bragg did not like the implication that he had pinched a younger colleague's idea. In fact, on that ill-fated Saturday morning, Francis realized that neither his nor Bragg's precise approaches were that good and that only isomorphous replacement methods held out real hope.

That fall of 1951 we had no reason to hope that we would be more than minor players in DNA research. The experimentalists at King's College London-Maurice Wilkins and Rosalind Franklin-were set to provide the definitive evidence for choosing one DNA model over another. But over the next year, their personalities clashed badly, and Maurice found himself driven away from X-ray analysis of DNA. Soon Rosalind had all the cards needed to solve the structure, provided she co-opted the model-building approach that Francis and I so passionately argued for. Here her greatest mistake was being put off by Francis's strong personality that she thought masked a bumptious overextended intellect.

Even less predictable was the inexplicable chemical botch that Linus Pauling, then universally perceived as the world's best chemist, made with his ill-conceived triple-stranded DNA helix. Late in 1952, we had become apprehensive when Linus's son, Peter, who had newly arrived in the unit to be a research student with John Kendrew, told us that "Pop" was working on DNA. Only 18 months before Linus had humiliated the Cambridge group with his a-helical fold for proteins. We breathed much, much easier in February 1953 when we read a manuscript from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) and saw that Pauling's DNA model was way off the mark.

Quickly I raced into London to alert the King's group that Pauling's new helix was a botch and we should expect him quickly to devise a better model. Rosalind, however, thought I was being unnecessarily hysterical, telling me in no uncertain terms that DNA was not helical. Afterwards, in the safety of his office, Maurice-bristling with anger at having been shackled now for almost two years by Rosalind's intransigence-let loose the, until then, closely guarded King's secret that DNA existed in a paracrystalline (B) form as well as a crystalline (A) form. In his mind the cross-shaped B-diffraction pattern, shown on the X-ray he then impulsively took out of a drawer for me to see, had to arise from helical symmetry.

Almost perversely, it was Linus Pauling's entry into the DNA game that made it possible for Francis and me to find the double helix. In November 1951, before it was clear that Pauling was out to get the DNA prize, Francis and I had been told by Sir Lawrence Bragg that DNA was off limits to the Cambridge unit because it belonged to the workers at King's. Even 14 months later, bad memories still existed of our awkward first attempts to build DNA models. But we then quickly gave up trying to guess the DNA structure and even passed details of the molds needed to build models to Maurice Wilkins. By now appraised of the B-form's existence, Bragg wanted Francis and me to have another go at building models. He hoped that our efforts-possibly coordinated with those in London-would generate the right answer before Pauling recovered his senses.

No one then could have anticipated that in less than a month...

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Verlag
Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press
Erscheinungsdatum
2002
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0375412832
ISBN 13 
9780375412837
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
259
Kontakt zum Hersteller
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Verantwortliche Person
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