by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2019 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night at 10 p.m. I put
on the TV to watch the PBS documentary American Masters: Decoding Watson, written, produced and directed by Mark Manucci, on
scientist James H. Watson. Watson’s chief claim to fame is that in 1952-53 he worked
with British scientist Francis Crick at the Cavendish Laboratories in England,
and they solved the problem of the structure of DNA with a deceptively simple
solution — the double helix, through which genes replicate because if you have
one half of a DNA molecule the other half must be its matching pair. Watson, Crick and Maurice
Wilkins, director of the department at Cavendish where Watson and Crick worked,
got the Nobel Prize for this discovery in 1962, though a key researcher who
found a major piece of evidence that helped them to the answer, Rosalind
Franklin (more on her later), got snubbed partly because a Nobel can only cite
at most three winners, and partly because the Nobel is never awarded
posthumously and by 1962 Franklin had been dead for four years. Watson then got
his second run at the brass ring in 1986 when he was put in charge of the Human
Genome Project — only to lose that position in the early 1990’s in a public
fight with National Institutes of Health director Dr. Bernadine Healy over
whether the human genome should be patentable (she said yes, Watson — much to
his credit — said no).
Watson’s career is an alternation between brilliant
science and mania: in 1968 he published a bitchy (there’s no other word for
it!) memoir of the DNA research called The Double Helix which had relatively nice things to say about his
British collaborator Francis Crick (Crick was 34 and working on his home turf,
Watson was a rambunctious 24-year-old American who came at least partly to
disrupt the place) and vicious, nasty things to say about virtually everyone
else: Maurice Wilkins, who ran the lab where Watson was working; Linus Pauling,
his great American-based rival (who probably would have been able to solve DNA
himself if McCarthyite travel restrictions hadn’t prevented him from going to
England and having a look at the Cavendish data), and most appallingly,
Rosalind Franklin, whom Watson referred to as “Rosy” (a nickname she hated). In
the book “Rosy” comes off as practically a wicked witch — an image of her
that’s persisted even in attempts to rehabilitate her reputation against
Watson’s attacks (one sympathetic biographer called his book Rosalind
Franklin: The Dark Lady of DNA) — mainly because Watson’s interest in women at the time was pretty
strictly limited to getting them to have sex with him, and “Rosy” was not only
unavailable in that department but unattractive to him (the book drips with
sexist comments saying that she should have ditched the glasses, dressed more
alluringly and “done something interesting with her hair”) and a scientist so
fiercely possessive of her data that Watson practically had to assault her (the
jury is still out on whether their confrontation got physically aggressive on
either side) to get a look at the famous “Photograph 51,” which gave Watson and
Crick the crucial information they needed to crack the puzzle of DNA’s
structure.
One point of contention between them was Franklin’s insistence that
DNA could be solved strictly by taking X-ray crystallographic pictures of it,
versus Watson’s and Crick’s use of models to see how the atoms could fit
together (which Franklin derisively dismissed as “Tinkertoys”) — and ironically
it was Franklin’s devotion to crystallography that denied her official
recognition as a co-discoverer of DNA’s structure. She died in 1958 at age 37
of cancer, almost certainly brought on by heavy-duty long-term exposure to the
X-rays and radiation she used in her work. The show cut back and forth between
the search for DNA, Watson’s other research topics, and the controversial
comments he made to the London Sunday Times Magazine in 2007 saying that IQ tests proved that Black
people are genetically inferior to whites and Asians and anyone who’d employed
Black people knew that as a group they were
stupider than whites — which got him bounced out of his position as director of
the research labs at Cold Spring Harbor and seemed in this presentation to be
something like Richard Wagner’s anti-Semitism: a brilliant man using his
considerable intellect to justify his stupid prejudices. Watson seems to have
been one of those people (like the even more infamously racist William
Shockley, inventor of the transistor) who, as brilliant as he may have been in
other fields, naïvely accepted the idea that IQ tests actually measure “intelligence.”
One of the most interesting parts of this show was that Watson may have been
both racist and sexist in his personal beliefs but he also gave women and
people of color key opportunities to advance in a scientific community that in
the 1960’s was still strongly prejudiced against them — though Watson freely
admits that one of the reasons he helped women advance in the lab he ran at
Harvard University in the 1960’s was he was looking for women who were both
intelligent and physically attractive in
hopes that he’d find a wife out of it — which he did, marrying an 18-year-old student,
Elizabeth Lewis, when he himself was 38. (In today’s political, social and
sexual climate, Watson would probably have fallen from grace even sooner than
he did because his behavior towards women would have been considered sexual
harassment.) The documentary also notes the irony that someone who believes in
the power of genes to determine just about every significant part of human
nature — one reason he bought into all that long-ago disproven nonsense about
whites supposedly being intellectually superior to Blacks and IQ tests as the
proof positive of that (IQ tests don’t measure “intelligence” so much as they
measure a cultural background and a particular kind of thinking whites and
Asians are more likely to have had access to and be adept at than Blacks) — and
who married a woman both for her beauty and her brains had two sons, Rufus (who
was schizophenic and attempted suicide) and Duncan (who looks like a normal
intellectual nerd but rather grimly admitted he doesn’t share the brilliance of
his parents. The Watson parents even concede that Rufus drew “a bad hand in the
gene pool” even though his dad was the discoverer of the structure of DNA and a
key contributor to mapping the human genome, and his mom was also an
intellectual and a scientist. “Decoding Watson” was a welcome program even if
Watson’s subsequent career — especially the last 25 years of it — tends to
illustrate the truth of James Agee’s comment about D. W. Griffith: “He lived
too long, and that is one of the few things sadder than dying too soon.”
