The New Elizabethans: Sixty Portraits of our Age. James Naughtie

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СКАЧАТЬ Crick was at the centre of it all, and even before the younger zoologist James Watson arrived from the United States in 1951 he was cooperating with a scientist at King’s College London called Maurice Wilkins, whose experiments were making progress. Fortunately, but awkwardly, Wilkins had a colleague at King’s without whom the story of DNA can’t be told. She was Rosalind Franklin.

      It was her work that gave Crick and Watson a leg-up. On one visit to London to see some of her experiments, Watson realized that she might have provided the key. Back in Cambridge he and Crick worked on a model. They invited their rivals from King’s to come and see it, describing it as ‘a clever thing’. Rosalind Franklin took one look at it and realized that they had taken her results, applied them to their own, but made a serious mistake. They had built a ‘triple helix’, and she told them where they had gone wrong.

      The background was like the setting of a C.P. Snow novel about skulduggery in the senior common room of the kind that he was just settling down to write. At King’s, Wilkins did not get on with Franklin at all. And to complicate matters, the head of the Cavendish Laboratory, William Bragg, was sensitive to the feelings of the King’s scientists, who didn’t want their work to be copied. He is said to have suggested to Crick and Watson that they stop working on DNA altogether. Wilkins confessed his despair at the whole business to Crick in a letter, and the atmosphere is well summed up in Crick’s reply, which came to light only a couple of years ago. He wrote to Wilkins: ‘… so cheer up and take it from us that even if we kicked you in the pants it was between friends. We hope our burglary will at least produce a united front in your group.’ The word ‘burglary’ was presumably meant as a mild joke.

      In Cambridge they seemed happy, in London miserable. Wilkins wrote to Crick about Franklin, who was about to leave King’s, and used a poisonous tone: ‘Let’s have some talks afterwards when the air is a little clearer. I hope the smell of witchcraft will soon be getting out of our eyes.’

      Crick and Watson carried on. The triple helix was transformed into the double helix, their own mistake corrected, and gradually – after a second article in Nature later in the year – the significance of the discovery began to be appreciated in a wider circle. And the names of Crick and Watson were bolted onto the double helix as if they were part of its origin, though many others had had a part in putting it together. Rosalind Franklin died of cancer in 1958, aged only 38.

      Francis Crick was born in Northampton, son of a shoe factory owner, and studied physics in London. In the Second World War he worked on weapons in the Admiralty, designing mines. Afterwards he decided he was more interested in biology. That abrupt change of direction was quite typical of a man who had a reputation for the unexpected gesture and a tendency towards utter certainty. When Watson wrote an account of their discovery in 1968, he produced an opening sentence about his friend and colleague that summed up their over-the-top and maybe brash style, separately and together. ‘I have never seen Francis Crick in a modest mood,’ said Watson. Neither saw any reason to be diplomatic, even about each other.

      It was not that their friendship was falling apart – it lasted until Crick’s death in 2004; Watson still survives him – but that they were a pair of swashbuckling scientists, whose meticulous work often seemed to take second place to their love of the instinctive thrust, the imaginative spring. The year after the double helix was built, Watson wrote to Crick: ‘The important thing is to ignore data, which complicates life.’

      The style was formidable. After Crick became celebrated he had a postcard printed for his secretary for use as a reply to enquirers. It was headed ‘Dr F.H.C. Crick thanks you for your letter but regrets that he is unable to accept your kind invitation to: …’ There followed a list of requests of the kind he was used to receiving: send an autograph, be interviewed, speak after dinner, deliver a lecture, read a manuscript, even ‘cure your disease’. His secretary had instructions to tick the appropriate category and send the postcard. It repelled all boarders.

      So Crick was a character, irascible on subjects like religion, which, like most philosophy, he abhorred. (He resigned from Churchill, a new Cambridge college, when he discovered they were building a chapel.) And those close to Rosalind Franklin, particularly, long held a grudge at what they believed was a betrayal of her originality and the contribution she’d made to genetic research.

      But it would be quite wrong to picture Crick as a scientist who happened to break the mould very early – he was 36 when the double helix paper was published – and spent the rest of his life being famous for it. The truth is that much of his pioneering work was done after that first discovery. He never left the territory he had staked out, and long after he was one of the three men who got the Nobel Prize in 1962 he was breaking new ground.

      The initial proposition had been that there was some kind of linear genetic message that could be passed on. They had discovered how genes could copy themselves and human life could replicate. We had a glimpse of how the essentials of human life were managed. But then what? It was a beginning, not an end. Crick set about working on the question of how genes coped with the instructions they’d been sent, and it was thirteen years after the first Nature paper before he felt able to declare that he might have an answer.

      The occasion was the annual meeting of molecular biologists at Cold Spring Harbor in the United States, where he was now working. They were scientists whose field of study had more or less been created by Crick and Watson and whose successors, a generation later, would find themselves in maybe the most exciting, ever-changing field of science, mapping the genome, inspiring medical research with possibilities, opening up territory for doctors as well as scientists that not long ago had been an impenetrable misty landscape with no signposts.

      Crick began that 1966 speech with the words: ‘This is an historic occasion. There have been many meetings about the genetic code during the past ten or twelve years but this is the first important one to be held since the code became known.’ A typically emphatic description. He went on to announce that he could now present to the world the genetic code in its entirety. It was this map that would become a guide for everyone working in molecular biology, and in medical laboratories everywhere the step-by-step unravelling of the genetic puzzle changed everything. Crick himself led the way, and it will be his name that is attached to the institute that will open in 2015 in London to bring together some of the world’s finest minds in biomedicine.

      It is worth remembering Watson’s reminder to Crick about data complicating life: go for the big idea. When they marched into the Eagle in Cambridge in 1953 convinced they had ‘got it’ they weren’t talking about a vast tome that they’d been writing in secret. Their article in Nature was only fourteen paragraphs long, and attached to it was a single diagram: the skeletal and beautiful picture of the double helix itself; the strange, sparse outline of the most intimate thing in the world.

Doris Lessing

      Some novelists take years to get into their stride, but it is true of Doris Lessing that if you want to understand her, and feel the full power of her imagination, you have to read her first book, which was published in 1950. The Grass is Singing is a story set in Africa, where she grew up, where she experienced unhappiness and political radicalization, and where she decided to be writer. More than half a century later Lessing had become a Nobel Laureate with dozens of books behind her, even an opera with Philip Glass.

      The Grass is Singing takes you to the kind of rolling landscape and bush where her father farmed in Southern Rhodesia, a generation before it became Zimbabwe, and where she developed a passionate desire to see an end to colonialism. The novel is an uncompromising journey into a world of fear and racial segregation where violence is as familiar as the wind that makes the grass sing. It’s a story of murder – committed by a black houseboy on the white woman to whom he is in effect a slave, but who is so fascinated and drawn to him СКАЧАТЬ