When I went to Oxford in October 1952 to work on bacteriophage with Hinshelwood, it was the intention of seeing whether physical
chemistry could provide help in solving biological problems. I should have gone to study molecular biology but the subject
did not yet exist. From my past experience in cytology and cytogenetics, I knew that DNA was the material basis of heredity
and that RNA was important for protein synthesis. I had read Schrödinger's book (What is Life? Cambridge; 1944) but, more importantly, I had read von Neumann's article (in Cerebral Mechanisms in Behaviour: the Hixon symposium. Edited by Jeffress L A: Hafner Publishing Company, New York; 1951) on the theory of self-reproducing machines. Beyond this,
I had many nebulous ideas on how nucleic acids might exert their function and on how we might test them, including one ridiculous
proposal that the structure of nucleic acids could be solved by dichroism measurements of DNA complexed with acridine dyes.
I met Jack Dunitz and Leslie Orgel in Oxford and we had many interesting discussion on these topics. It was Jack who told
me that the structure of DNA had probably been solved by two people in Cambridge, Francis Crick and Jim Watson, and I can
remember trying to understand Jack's explanation of Francis' work on helical diffraction.
On a chilly morning in April 1953, with Jack, Leslie and another crystallographer, I went to Cambridge and saw the model and
met Francis and Jim. It was the most exciting day of my life. The double helix was a revelatory experience; for me, everything
fell into place and my future scientific life was decided there and then.
When the paper appeared a few weeks later, it was not well received by the establishment, composed largely of professional
biochemists. They could not see, at the time, how profoundly it would change their subject by offering us a framework for
studying the chemistry of biological information.
"A Structure for Deoxyribose Nucleic Acid" by J D Watson and F H C Crick. Nature 1953, 171:737-738. Appears in "Outstanding Papers in Biology," selected and introduced by Sydney Brenner. 1953.
At once I felt something was not right. I could not pinpoint the mistake, however, until I looked at the illustrations for
several minutes. Then I realized that the phosphate groups in Linus' model were not ionized, but that each group contained
a bound hydrogen atom and so had no net charge. Pauling's nucleic acid in a sense was not an acid at all. Moreover, the uncharged
phosphate groups were not incidental features. The hydrogens were part of the hydrogen bonds that held together the three
intertwined chains. Without the hydrogen atoms, the chains would immediately fly apart and the structure vanish.
Everything I knew about nucleic-acid chemistry indicated that phosphate groups never contained bound hydrogen atoms. No one
had ever questioned that DNA was a moderately strong acid. Thus, under physiological conditions, there would always be positively
charged ions like sodium or magnesium lying nearby to neutralize the negatively charged phosphate groups. All our speculations
about whether divalent ions held the chains together would have made no sense if there were hydrogen atoms firmly bound to
phosphates. Yet somehow Linus, unquestionably the world's most astute chemist, had come to the opposite conclusion.
James Watson, The Double Helix. 1968.
Question: Competitiveness in Double Helix?
"I probably understated it. It is the dominant motive in science".
James Watson oral history interview, American Philosophical Society. March 2, 1971.
"And, as I recount in The Double Helix, I thought Bragg was just a stuffy old man when I met him. But he was a fine man. He had a really keen interest in science,
and he was certainly Francis's only competition at the time-in the sense that he was a theoretician. And he had a difficult
time, because most people thought that it was his father who had been the clever one, whereas it was the younger Bragg who'd
made the running."
James Watson quoted in Nature, 302, 21 (April 1983): 652. April 1983.
"But I guess I owe most of all to Francis, who really did look after me, and who often tried to keep me from being silly.
I wasn't as silly as he thought, but he was so sensible that I had occasionally to say things I didn't believe, to see if
I could trap him. And I sometimes did".
James Watson quoted in article in Nature, 302, 21 (April 1983): 652. April 1983.
"I couldn't have got anywhere without Francis, so I really felt a little strange coming back here for this meeting, because
it's without Francis. It could have been Crick without Watson, but certainly not Watson without Crick".
James Watson quoted in Nature, 302, 21 (April 1983): 652. April 1983.
"Rosalind Franklin was a very intelligent woman, but she really had no particular reason for believing that DNA was particularly
important. She was trained in physical chemistry. I don't think she'd ever spend any length of time with people who thought
DNA was important. And she certainly didn't talk to Maurice [Wilkins] or to John Randall, then the professor at Kings".
James Watson quoted in Nature, 302, 21 (April 1983): 653. April 1983.
"Linus [Pauling] didn't deserve to get the structure. He really didn't read the literature. And he didn't talk to anyone either.
He'd even forgotten his own paper with Max Delbruck which said that a gene should replicate by complementarity. He seems to
consider that he should have got the structure because he was so bright, but really he didn't deserve it".
James Watson quoted in Nature, 302, 21 (April 1983): 653. April 1983.
"And then Sydney [Brenner] came over. On about the first occasion I saw Sydney, we talked about six hours non-stop. Sydney
had a few bright friends in Oxford who talked about DNA, but they didn't have expert pictures and didn't do anything about
it".
James Watson quoted in Nature, 302, 21 (April 1983): 654. April 1983.
"Both Francis and I had no doubts that DNA was the gene. But most people did. And again, you might say, "Why didn't Avery
get the Nobel Prize?" Because most people didn't take him seriously. Because you could always argue that his observations
were limited to bacteria, or that [the transformation of Pneumococcus that he described was caused by] a protein resistant to proteases and that the DNA was just scaffolding".
James Watson quoted in Nature, 302, 21 (April 1983): 654. April 1983.
"But I doubt whether Francis and I combined spent more than ten worrying whether the structure was right, whether they would
take it away from us or something like that. So it was very satisfying when we saw that the replication scheme seemed to be
right..."
James Watson quoted in Nature, 302, 21 (April 1983): 654. April 1983.
Nature did celebrate twenty-one years, and that was really nice, because Francis [Crick] wrote and, in particular, Linus [Pauling]
wrote. But we couldn't sell the twenty-fifth anniversary very big, because we were still mad at each other.
James Watson, "Thirty years of DNA," Nature, Vol. 302 21, April 1983. April 1983.
"To have success in science, you need some luck. Without it, I would never have become interested in genetics. I was 17, almost
3 years into college, and after a summer in the North Woods, I came back to the University of Chicago and spotted the tiny
book What is Life by the theoretical physicist Erwin Schrodinger. In that little gem, Schrodinger said the essence of life was the gene. Up
until then, I was interested in birds. But then I thought, well, if the gene is the essence of life, I want to know more about
it. And that was fateful because, otherwise, I would have spent my life studying birds and no one would have heard of me".
James Watson, "Succeeding in Science: Some Rules of Thumb", Science, 261, 24 (September 1993): 1812. September 1993.
"To succeed in science, you have to avoid dumb people... Even as a child, I never liked to play tag with anyone who was bad
as I was. If you win, it gives you no pleasure. And in the game of science-or life-the highest goal isn't simply to win, it's
to win at something really difficult. Put another way, it's to go somewhere beyond your ability and come out on top."
James Watson, "Succeeding in Science: Some Rules of Thumb", Science, 261, 24 (September 1993): 1812. September 1993.
"Francis Crick and I were both in trouble at various times in our careers, but that never really stopped us, because we always
found someone to save us."
James Watson, "Succeeding in Science: Some Rules of Thumb", Science, 261, 24 (September 1993): 1812. September 1993.
"...Never do anything that bores you. My experience in science is that someone is always telling you to do things that leave
you flat. Bad idea. I'm not good enough to do well something I dislike. In fact, I find it hard enough to do well something
that I like."
James Watson, "Succeeding in Science: Some Rules of Thumb", Science, 261, 24 (September 1993): 1812. September 1993.
"Constantly exposing your ideas to informed criticism is very important, and I would venture to say that one reason both of
our chief competitors failed to reach the Double Helix before us was that each was effectively very isolated. Rosalind Franklin
found small talk awkward and until it was too late did not realize how much good advice Francis would willingly have given
her. Had she started to talk to him, Francis would have led her to use her facts to find the base pairs. And then there's
Linus Pauling. Linus' fame had gotten himself into a position where everyone was afraid to disagree with him. The only person
he could freely talk to was his wife, who reinforced his ego, which isn't what you need in this life."
James Watson, "Succeeding in Science: Some Rules of Thumb", Science, 261, 24 (September 1993): 1812. September 1993.
"My sometimes ambivalent feelings toward Linus over the past 40 years would have been very different if the facts in Hager's
book had been more widely known earlier. All in all, Linus was a very mortal God."
Letter from James D. Watson to Bob Bender (VP Senior Editor, Simon Schuster) (letterhead of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory). September 27, 1995.
"Let's just start with the Pauling thing. There's a myth which is, you know, that Francis and I basically stole the structure
from the people at King's. I was shown Rosalind Franklin's x-ray photograph and, Whooo! that was a helix, and a month later
we had the structure, and Wilkins should never have shown me the thing.
I didn't go into the drawer and steal it, it was shown to me, and I was told the dimensions, a repeat of 34 angstroms, so,
you know, I knew roughtly what it meant and, uh, but it was that the Franklin photograph was the key event. It was, psychologically, it mobilised us..."
James Watson, Center for Genomic Research Inauguration, Harvard. September 30, 1999.
