The double Helix 「二重らせん」、J・ワトソン、訳；江上不二夫、中村桂子、470円講談社文庫、1986.3.15初版（1968.9初訳、原著の副題はDNAの構造の発見についての個人的記録）


有名な本であるのは聞いていましたが、八重洲で入手、そのうち読もうという程度であり、読み出すと、これは一気に、最後まで惹き付けて離せないほど面白いものでした。
フィクションであってもおかしくないというか、事実は小説より奇なり、が当てはまる内容でした。科学者の内部が赤裸々に書かれているだけに、余り科学業界からは推薦したくない本にもみえました。
フランシス・クリックは天才肌の人、ジェームス・ワトソンは秀才型マネージャーと異質のコンビ、1962年に同時受賞したMaurice Wilkins（凡庸）, その助手のRosalind Franklin（かたい女性研究者）, 1954年にノーベル化学賞のlinus Pauling（功名心のかたまり）とのその息子のPeter（キャベンディシュに在籍、出来は悪い）、所長のSir Lawrence Gragg（1915年父子でノーベル物理学賞、あまり有能でない人）が主登場人物で、基線は天才ポーリングとのDNA構造解析の先陣あらそいですがその、なかで先任研究者のWilkinsとその非常に仲の悪い助手Franklinが研究の対抗馬として描かれています。
さて、この本の影の主人公というか、DNAの構造解析の主役は女性研究者のロザリンド（ロージィ）・フランクリンではというのが感想です。タイム誌の20世紀の100人特集でワトソン・クリックについて書かれていますが、クリックの発言としてフランクリン（1958年に37歳でガンで死亡）が生きていればウィルキンスではなく彼女にノーベル賞が与えられていたとのことです。
本書でもロージィのＸ線解析のデータ・写真が二重らせんへの枢要の裏付けと各所でています。「驚いたことに彼（モーリス）は助手のウィルソンを使ってひそかにロージィやゴスリングのＸ線の結果を複写させていることを白状した」という記述もあります。
ワトソンはこの本の中ではかなり辛辣にロージィを描いているのですが、エピローグでは暖かい言葉を贈っています。
この本は20世紀の科学ノンフィクションでは、間違いなく名著として残るものですが、本翻訳の最後に、登場人物紹介コーナーがあり、11名の名前、いずれもそうそうたる人々ですがロージィの名前はありません。中村桂子さんの翻訳ですが（もっとも江上本時代からの引き継ぎかも）、これはいただけませんでした。

○ローレンス・ブラッグ卿の序文
この物語が研究に携わる者が直面するつらいジレンマの一例を見せてくれる。ある研究者がひとつの問題について長年研究をつづけて、苦労して得た豊富な実験結果を手にしているのだが、あと一歩ですべてが解決しそうなので、その時を期して研究成果の発表を控えているとする。たまたまそのデータを見た彼の同僚が新手を思い付きちょっと観点を変えてあたれば、問題はすぐにも解けると確信したとする。しかし、その段階で彼が共同研究を申し入れるとすれば前からの研究者の権利を侵害したと思われても仕方がない。では彼は、独立に仕事を進めるべきだろうか。決め手となる新しいアイデアを思い付いたとき、それが本当に自分自身のものか、それとも仲間と話している間に知らずに知らずのうちに吸収されたものかを判定するのはむずかしい。
したがって、科学者の間では同僚がそれまで大切にしてきた一連の研究に手をつけることもある程度までは認めるという漠然とした不文律が出来ている。競争が２箇所以上で起こるとなれば、もはや遠慮はいらないのだ。DNA物語の場合にも、あきらかにこのようなジレンマがおきた。
＜略＞この本は歴史的な事実というよりむしろ個人的な印象をしるしたものである。事の顛末は当時、ワトソン君が考えていたほど単純ではなく、また関係者の真意は彼のみるほど歪められたものでもなかった。とはいうものの、人間の弱点に対するワトソン君の直観がしばしば的を射ていることは認めないわけにはゆかない。

○エピローグ
＜略＞ロザリンド・フランクリンは1958年､37歳の若さでこの世を去った。私が彼女から受けた第一印象は、学問上のことにせよ、人間的な面にせよ、あまりよいものではなかったので、本書のはじまりにみられるようについ非難の筆が走ってしまった。しかしここで彼女の偉大な業績に一言ふれておきたいと思う。彼女がキングスで行ったＸ線の仕事とはますます高く評価されてきている。
＜略＞そのころには、我々にも彼女の正直でさっぱりした性格がわかってきた。科学の世界には、女性を、真剣な思考から解き放ってくれる気晴らしくらいににしか考えない傾向がある。ロージィのように高い知性にめぐまれた女性は、そういう世界に受入れてもらうために、ひときわ苦闘せねばならなかったのである。我々がそれに気付いたのは、余りにも遅すぎたようだ。自分の不治の病を知りながら泣き言もいわず、その死の数週間前まで高度の研究を続けているロザリンドの姿をみて、だれもが、その厳しい勇気と誠実さに強く心を打たれたのである。

（米国週刊誌タイム特集）
March 29, 1999 Time 100 Special Issue, vol.153,No.12 SCIENTISTS & THINKERS OF THE 20TH CENTURY

Molecular Biologist Watson & Crick
It took an ex-physicist and a former ornithology student-along with some unwitting help from a competitor-to crack the secret of life By ROBERT WRIGHT
CRICK. LEFT, AND WATSON. THIRD FROM RIGHT. AT THE 1962 NOBEL PRIZE CEREMONY. NEXT TO CRICK IS MAURICE WILKINS, WHOSE LAB PROVIDED A CRUCIAL X-RAY IMAGE OF DNA
The structure was too pretty not to be true. JAMES D WATSON, The Double Helix
Born Crick, on June 8, 1916, in Northampton, England;
Watson, on April 6, 1928, in Chicago
1951 Collaboration begins
1953 The double helix
1961 Crick's team finds genetic code for proteins
1962 Nobel Prize, shared with Maurice Wilkins
1968 Watson's The Double Helix is published
1968 Watson is director of Cold Spring Harbor Lab
1977 Crick begins brain reserach at Salk Institute
1988 Watson named head of U.S. Human Genome Project;later resigns
On Feb. 28, 1953,Francis Crick walked into the Eagle pub in Cambridge. England, and, as James Watson later recalled, announced that "we had found the secret of life." Actually, they had. That morning. Watson and Crickhad figured out the structure of deoxyribonucleic acid, DNA. And that structure-a "double helix" that can "unzip" to make copies of itself-confirmed suspicions that DNA carries life's hereditary information. Not until decades later, in the age of genetic engineering, would the Promethean power unleashed that day become vivid. But from the beginning, the Watson and Crick story had traces of hubris. As told in Watson's classic memoir, The Double Helix, it was a tale of boundless ambition, impatience with authority and disdain, if not contempt, for received opinion.
("A goodly number of scientists," Watson explained, "are not only narrow-minded and dull but also just stupid.") Yet the Watson and Crick story is also one of sublime harmony, an example, as a colleague put it, of "that marvelous resonance between two minds-that high state in which I plus I does not equal 2 but more like 10." The men were in some ways an odd pair.
The British Crick, at 35, still had no Ph.D, The American Watson, 12 years Criek's junior, had graduated from the University of Chicago at 19 and nabbed his doctorate at 22. But they shared a certain wanderlust, an indifference to boundaries. Crick had migrated from physics into chemistry and biology, fascinated by the line "between the living and the nonliving." Watson had studied ornithology, then forsook birds for viruses, and then, doing postdoctoral work in Europe, took another sharp career turn. At a conference in Naples,Watson saw a vague, ghosily image of a DNA molecule rendered by X-ray crystallography. DNA, he had heard, might be the stuff genes are made of. "A potential key to the secret of life was impossible to push out of my mind," he later wrote. "It was certainly better to imagine myself becoming famous than maturing into a stifled academic who had never risked a thought."
This theme of Watson's book-the hot pursuit of glory, the race against the chemist Linus Pauling for the Nobel Prize that DNA Would surely bringgot bad reviews from the (relatively) genteel Crick.
He didn't recall anyone mentioning a Nobel Prize. "My impression was that we were just, you know, mad keen to solve the problem," he later said. But whatever their aims, Watson and Crick shared an attraction to DNA and when they wound up in the same University of Cambridge lab, they bonded. Fatefully, such amity did not prevail at a laboratory over at King's College, London, where a woman named Rosalind Franklin was creating the world's best X-ray diffraction pietures of DNA. Maurice Wilkins, a colleague who was also working on DNA, disliked the precociously feminist Franklin, and the feeling was mutual. By Watson's account, this estrangement led Wilkins to show Watson one of Franklin's best pictures yet, which hadn't been published. "The instant I saw the picture my mouth fell open," Watson recalled. The sneak preview "gave several of the vital helical parameters." Franklin died of cancer in 1958, at 37. In 1962 the Nobel Prize, which isn't given posthumously, went to Watson, Crick and Wilkins.
In Crick's view, if Franklin had lived, "it would have been impossib]e to give the prize to Maurice and not to her" because "she did the key experimcutal work," And her role didn't end there. Her critique of an early Watson and Crick theory had sent them back to the drawing board, and her notebooks show her working toward the solution until they fuund it; she had narrowed the structure down to some sort of double helix, but she never employed a key tool-the big 3-D molecular models that Watson and Crick were fiddling with at Cambridge. It was Watson who fit the final piece into place. He was in the lab, pondering cardboard replicas of the four bases that, we now know, constitute DNA's alphabet: adenine, thymine, guanine and cytosine, or A, T, G and C. He realized that "an adenine-thymine pair held together by two hydrogen bonds was identical in shape to a guanine-cytosine pair."
These pairs of bases could thus serve as the rings on the twisting ladder of DNA. Here-in the "complementarity" between A and T, between C and G-lay the key to replication, In the double helix, a single strand of genetic alphabet-say, CAT-is paired, rung by rung, with its complementary strand, GTA, When the helix unzips, the complestrand becomes a template; its G,T and A bases naturally attract bases that amount to a carbon copy of the original strand, CAT. A new double helix has been built.
Watson's famous "Aha?" was but the last in long chain. It was Crick who had fastened onto a chemist friend's theoretical hunch of a natural attraction between A and T, C and G. He had then championed the complementarity scenario-sometimes against Watson's resistance- as a possible explanation of "Chargaff's rules," the fact that DNA contains like amounts of adenine and thymine and of guanine and cytosin. But it was Watson who had first learned of these rules.
As Horace Freeland Judson obserbed in The Eighth Day of Creation, this sort of synergy is above all, what Rosalind Franklin Lacked. Working in a largely male field in an age when women weren't allowed in the faculty coffee room, she had no one to bond with-no sopportive critic whose knowledge matched her gaps, whose gaps her knowledge matched.
Writing up their findings for the journal Nature, the famously brash Watson and Crick donned a British reserve. They capped a dry account of DNA's structure with one of the most famous understatements in the history of science: "It has not escapedd our notice that the specific pairing we have postulated immediately suggests a possibie copying mechanism for the genetic material." They faced the question of byline:Watson and Crick, or Crick and Watson? They flipped a coin. The double helix-both the book and the molecule-did nothing to slow this century's erosion of innocence. Watson's account, depicting researchers as competitive and spiteful-as human helped de-deify scicntists and bring cynicism to science writing. And DNA, once unveiled, left little room for the ethereal, vitalistic accounts of life that so many people had found comforting.
Indeed, Crick, a confirmed agnostic, rather liked deflating vitalism -a mission he pursued with zeal, spearheading decades ofwork on how exactly DNA builds things before he moved on to do brain rescarch at the Salk Institutc for Biological Studies in La Jolla, Calif.
Watson drifted from pure science into administration. As director of the molecular-biology lab at Cold Spring Harbor, N.Y., he turned it into a scientific powerhouse. He also served as head of the Human Genomc Project, absorbing some fallout from the high-energy ethical debates whose fuse he and Crick had lighted nearly four decades earlier. As the practical and philosophical issues opened by the double helix continue to unfold, policy, philosophy and even religion will evolve in response. But one truth seems likely to endure, universal and immutable. It emorges with equal clarity whether you examine tth DNA molecule or the way it was revealed the secret of life is complementarity.
Robert Wright is author of The Moral Animal: Evolutionary