Eureka proclaimed too loudly

James Watson has all the makings of a great biographical subject. He is notoriously volatile, splenetic, and aggressive. During his career he has not fought shy of public controversy. And of course he is globally famous for a single achievement: having been one of the two men who, in 1953, ‘discovered’ the double-helix structure of DNA. The discovery was, as one peer put it, ‘a scientist’s dream: simple, elegant, and universal for all organisms’. It brought the pathologically ambitious Watson a Nobel Prize at the age of 34, and ‘triggered and sustained a revolution in science that affects us all’.

The story of how that discovery occurred, like that of most scientific epiphanies, exists in several forms. It has, as a chemist might put it, multiple allotropes. There is the wipe-clean Eureka legend that has Watson and Crick swilling bitter in the Eagle pub in Cambridge, and scribbling the double helix on the back of a beer-mat during 30 minutes of visionary brilliance.