This is an unusual biography, in several ways. First, it is the biography of two people, not one. The names of James Watson and Francis Crick are bound together forever. You cannot mention Watson without mentioning Crick, because the discovery they made about the molecule of life was truly a joint enterprise.

Years after the discovery, Crick recalled introducing Watson to someone at the laboratory where Crick was working. “Watson?” the person said in surprise. “I thought your name was Watson-Crick.”



On April 25, 1953, the science journal Nature published a paper entitled “Molecular Structure of Nucleic Acids: A Structure for Deoxyribose Nucleic Acid.” The paper was submitted by James D. Watson and Francis H. C. Crick. It was a short paper, just 128 lines in print, but it stands as a landmark in the history of science. Those few lines carried nothing less than the code of life on earth. Our lives and our health today are being shaped in many ways by the ramifications of that scientific paper. When they published their paper, Watson and Crick were young scientists, not widely known at all. But that paper changed the situation totally. Suddenly they were among the most famous scientists in the world. In a few years of intensive effort they had won a high-stakes race against some of the most distinguished scientists in the United States and Europe.

The collaboration of Watson and Crick lasted only a few years before their careers moved in different directions, yet their achievement was enough to tie their names together forever in the history of science. And it also established a firm footing for a branch of science that was just then emerging: molecular biology, the study of the structure and function of the molecules that govern the development and activities of living things. The creation of the idea of molecular biology was the newest step in a drastic change in the scientific conception of living things. This change had come about perhaps a century earlier, when the detailed scientific study of living things had begun in earnest. At that time, many people drew a rigid line between inanimate objects and living creatures. Their idea was that living things were too complex to be explained by the rules of science that applied to ordinary objects.

Molecular biology did away with the last vestiges of that belief. Its guiding principle was—and is—that most, if not all, of the characteristics of living beings can be explained by studying the molecules of which they are made. At the center of molecular biology is deoxyribonucleic acid, DNA, the molecule whose composition determines almost all of those characteristics. The work by Watson and Crick was a milestone in establishing the importance of molecular biology. Watson and Crick were not alone. They worked with, competed against, and drew upon the efforts of distinguished—and almost invariably older—scientists in a number of countries. From the start, they knew they were in a competition of world-class ranking. Emotions could run high in such a competition. Hatred, jealousy, and admiration were all displayed by different players at different times. It was far from certain that the eventual outcome of the story would center on Watson and Crick; a change or twist here and there would have made all the difference. Yet it was this team that won in the end.

It was a day early in October 1951 when a young American scientist named James Dewey Watson met an older British scientist named Francis Harry Compton Crick at the Cavendish Laboratory of Cambridge University in England. At first glance, the two men appeared to have little or nothing in common. They came from different backgrounds in different countries and had what seemed to be very different personalities.

Jim Watson, the American, appeared on the surface to be soft spoken and self-effacing, a quiet man on most occasions. (His brashness would emerge later, in the book he wrote about the hunt for the structure of DNA, The Double Helix.) He was also a strange-looking figure in the Britain of that time, tall and lanky and very American-looking to the British eye. One secretary at Cambridge described him as bald, because he had a crew cut, quite different from the longer hair of most British scientists. After he heard that description, Watson immediately began to let his hair grow. Crick, in contrast to Watson, had a booming voice and was fond of talking (“I have never seen Francis Crick in a modest mood,” Watson was to write years later as the opening sentence of The Double Helix). The two young men even came from different scientific disciplines. What they did have in common, however, was brilliance—which was to fashion a partnership that wrote a memorable chapter in the history of science.

Jim Watson was born in Chicago in 1928 into a family without much money. His father was a bill collector whose hobby was birdwatching, a pastime he taught to young Jim. His mother worked as a secretary at the University of Chicago. In his early years, Jim Watson carried on a running debate with his mother about the relative importance of nature—inheritance—versus nurture in shaping individuals. Watson used to argue the side of the environment, while his mother stressed the importance of heredity. Young Jim Watson attended Chicago’s public schools, where his intelligence was evident from the start. In those days there was a radio program called Quiz Kids, on which bright youngsters amazed the listeners by answering difficult questions demanding encyclopedic knowledge. Jim Watson was a Quiz Kid. But he lasted only three sessions before being let go, because he made mistakes on questions about Shakespeare and religion, two subjects that did not interest him much.

Being a bookish child did not make life easy for Watson. “I wasn’t a popular kid,” he recalled decades later. “I suspect it was because I would generally say something which I thought was true. In those days, I used to think manners were terrible—the truth was important and manners often hid the truth.”

In those days, the University of Chicago was run by an educator named Robert Hutchins who had the revolutionary idea of admitting bright students two years before they would have graduated from high school and allowing them to take a full four-year set of college courses. Jim Watson entered the University of Chicago in 1943, at the age of 15, helped somewhat by the fact that his mother worked for the university. Watson lived at home, taking the streetcar to his classes.

At that time, Watson’s major interest was in birds, and he wanted to make a career in ornithology. He demonstrated his intelligence by graduating from the University of Chicago with a degree in biology in just three years, in 1946, but stayed on for another year. He spent the summer of 1946 at the University of Michigan taking a course in ornithology, but his interest in birds soon faded. Watson applied to graduate school in biochemistry at Harvard—and was turned down. He applied to the California Institute of Technology, but was rejected again. Finally he was given a research fellowship for the 1947–48 academic year at Indiana University in Bloomington, with a stipend of $900 (enough to live on at the time). Watson was an unusual-looking fellow at the university—tall, thin, awkward, always dressed casually, usually wearing tennis shoes, not able to make many friends. In the seminars that were held on Friday evenings so graduate students could discuss their work, he made some enemies by his habit of opening a book to read if he considered the speaker to be dull.

Because of Watson’s obvious brilliance, and despite his bad manners, the university extended his financial support after his research fellowship ended. Watson earned his doctorate in biochemistry at Indiana in May 1950, then looked around for a place where he could continue his work. It was arranged for him to go to Europe. At the age of 21, he was granted a fellowship to work on biochemistry in Copenhagen.

But reading What Is Life?, a book by the great scientist Erwin Schrödinger, changed his outlook. Schrödinger said that the gene was the central issue in the study of biology and that every effort should be made to discover what genes were and how they worked. Watson decided that an excellent place to pursue that study would be the Cavendish Laboratory, in the university town of Cambridge, England. That laboratory had an unmatched ability to use X-ray pictures to determine the three-dimensional structure of biological molecules. It was at the Cavendish Laboratory that Watson met Francis Crick.

Crick had also read Schrödinger’s book. As he wrote later, it “conveyed in an exciting way the idea that, in biology, molecular explanations would not only be extremely important but also that they were just around the corner. This had been said before, but Schrödinger’s book was very timely and attracted people who might otherwise not have entered biology at all.”

Crick, like Watson, was born to parents who were not rich. They were shoe merchants in a town called Northampton, whose main business was shoe manufacturing (the local soccer team was called the Cobblers). Crick was born in 1916, which made him 12 years older than Watson.

Young Francis Crick went to a typical public school (as private schools are called in England). There he displayed an intense interest in science. That interest, he wrote many years later, came from reading a children’s encyclopedia his parents bought for him. Its articles on science appealed to him most, especially stories of scientific discovery. He decided that he would be a scientist and discover things. “But I foresaw one snag,” he wrote later. “By the time I grew up—and how far away that seemed—everything would have been discovered.” His mother reassured him that there would be plenty left to find out. By the time he was 10, Francis Crick was doing experiments at home. One of them was to put an explosive mixture into bottles and blow them up. His parents therefore imposed a rule that a bottle could be blown up only when it was in a pail of water, so that the pieces would not fly through the air.

Crick enrolled in University College, London, studying physics. Then as now, obtaining a doctorate in a scientific field was an essential step in establishing a career in that field. Crick had his master’s degree and was close to obtaining his doctorate in physics when World War II broke out. That had an immediate, direct effect on his work. His laboratory was destroyed by a German bomb, and pursuing his academic studies became impossible. During the war, Crick worked for the British Admiralty on underwater mines—how to make them, how to find them, how to destroy them. He came to Cambridge University after the war, in 1947, at age 31, still without a doctorate.

By then Crick’s interests had shifted to biology. Applying for a student research grant, he wrote that “the particular field which excited my interest is the division between the living and the non-living, as typified by, say, proteins, viruses, bacteria and the structure of chromosomes. The eventual goal, which is somewhat remote, is the description of these activities in terms of their structure.... This might be called the chemical physics of biology.” Crick moved over to the Cavendish Laboratory, a part of Cambridge University, in 1949. Crick later recalled how he met Watson. “I came home one day. We were living in a little flat in the center of Cambridge in those days, and my wife said to me, ‘Oh Max was round here with a young American, and do you know, he had no hair.’ [That crew cut again.]... I don’t recall exactly the moment we met. I remember the chats we had over those first two or three days.” The apartment where Crick and his French-born wife, Odile, lived, was in the upper floor of a several-hundredyear-old house in Cambridge. It was very small, but as Watson later recalled, “despite the cramp, its great charm, magnified by Odile’s decorative sense, gave it a cheerful, if not playful spirit.”

Odile was Crick’s second wife. His first marriage had not lasted long and a son, Michael, lived with Crick’s mother. Odile was a free spirit and a good cook. She not only brightened Crick’s life but also provided him with meals that were far superior to the standard British fare of tasteless meat, boiled potatoes, and colorless greens. Watson was soon eating dinner with them several nights a week. One of Odile’s charms, Watson later recalled, was that she wasn’t offended by Crick’s open admiration of young women who “showed some vitality and were distinctive in any way that permitted gossip and amusement.” She also introduced Crick to a world of arts and crafts that was entirely new to him.

Words flowed freely when Crick, Odile, and Watson spent evenings together. One story that Watson remembered was of a costume party that Crick went to dressed as George Bernard Shaw, the red-bearded author. As soon as Crick entered, he realized that it was a ghastly error, since not one of the young women enjoyed being tickled by the wet, scraggly hairs when he came within kissing distance.

Crick and Watson became friends as soon as they met. “Jim and I hit it off immediately, partly because our interests were astonishingly similar and partly, I suspect, because a certain youthful arrogance, a ruthlessness and an impatience with sloppy thinking came naturally to both of us,” Crick wrote later in his autobiography. Soon they were having lunch almost every day in a picturesque pub, the Eagle, a block away from the Cavendish Laboratory, and talking almost nonstop at the laboratory. “We’re going to put you and him in the same office and you can talk to each other and not disturb the rest of us,” one senior scientist finally said to Crick.

As Crick wrote about Watson, “He was the first person I met who thought the same way about biology as I did. . . . I decided that genetics was the really essential part, what the genes were and what they did. And Watson was the first person I had met who had exactly the same ideas as I had. . . . Our ideas of a general nature were already formed when we met, and we merely, as it were, went on to discuss the details—what were genes made of and so on.” The two brought different kinds of expertise to the studies they wanted to do. Watson was trained in biology, the study of nature and the chemistry of living things. Crick had been trained in physics, which ordinarily does not deal with the nature of living things. He, too, had been made to change his attitude by reading Schrödinger’s book What Is Life?

As Crick noted, their conversations began to center on the pressing biological issue of the day: determining the structure of the molecule that made up human genes, deoxyribonucleic acid, abbreviated as DNA. It was apparent to them and to numerous other scientists that finding the structure of DNA would answer many basic questions about living things and how they reproduce. Watson and Crick decided to use X rays to look at the structure of DNA. For Crick, agreeing to study DNA was a major career change. He had been working on proteins for two years and was just beginning to master the subject. It would take at least two years to make the full switch to studying DNA. In addition, there was a personal problem. At that time, the study in England of the DNA molecule was dominated by Maurice Wilkins, a scientist at King’s College in London who was using X-ray diffraction as his basic tool. Crick thus put himself in direct competition with Wilkins, an awkward situation in the small world of British science. Nonetheless, he did it.

In tackling the DNA issue with Watson, Crick later wrote, their personalities and positions meshed: “If I had some idea, which as it turned out was going off at a tangent, Watson would tell me in no uncertain terms this was nonsense, and vice versa. It is one of the requirements for collaboration of this sort that you must be perfectly candid, one might almost say rude, to the person you are working with. It is useless working with someone who is either much too junior than yourself, or much too senior, because then politeness creeps in, and this is the end of all good collaboration in science.”