Kevin Shapiro
May 2008

Until last year, James Dewey Watson was famous for two things. One
was his discovery, with Francis Crick, of the structure of DNA, for
which he was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1962. The other was the fast-
paced, no-holds-barred account of the competition for that discovery
in his bestselling memoir The Double Helix, published in 1968. These
achievements were more than enough to establish Watson as one of the
preeminent figures of the last century, and they might have
guaranteed him the reverence of the public and of his fellow
scientists for the rest of his life. But Watson was only forty when
The Double Helix was published, and he still had many years in which
to wear out his esteem.

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He made good use of them. Watson's formidable scientific and literary
skills have never been matched by an even temper or good social
judgment, and in 2007 the worst finally happened: the septuagenarian
geneticist told the (London) Sunday Times that he was "inherently
gloomy about the prospect of Africa" because "all our social policies
are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours-
whereas all the testing says not really." Not content with
this, he went on to assert that while he would have liked to believe
that everyone was equal, "people who have to deal with black
employees find this not true."

These imprudent remarks soon cost Watson his job as head of the Cold
Spring Harbor Laboratory, and earned him instant renown as a racist
dinosaur. But those who had followed his career were surprised only
that it took so long for him to face any consequences for his public
outbursts. In the scientific community, he has long been regarded
as "something of a wild man," as the journal Science once put it.
Over the past four decades he has contended, at various times, that
parents should be allowed to euthanize genetically unsatisfactory
babies; that the development of a genetic test for homosexuality
would provide reasonable grounds for abortion; that fat people are
inherently unhappy; and that skin pigmentation is correlated with sex
drive.

Why on earth did Watson say these things? In part, undoubtedly,
because he believes them. But the title of his latest autobiography--
Avoid Boring People--offers an additional clue. * Certainly Watson
himself is anything but boring, and, for all that he pretends to be
surprised when he causes offense, one has the impression that his
infatuation with his own brilliance is the one unshakeable fact of
his life. Along with its two predecessors, The Double Helix and an
earlier memoir called Genes, Girls, and Gamow (2002), Avoid Boring
People recaps Watson's career and offers a glimpse into how one
insouciant scientist has managed to push the envelope for so long.

AS THE book's subtitle suggests, Avoid Boring People is nominally
organized around a series of"remembered lessons" that Watson has
abstracted from his life--or, rather, from the first 50 or so years
of that life, beginning with his boyhood in Depression-era Chicago
and ending with his departure from Harvard for Cold Spring Harbor,
New York, in 1975. These lessons, presented in numbered lists at the
end of each chapter, range in utility from the eminently practical
("Avoid fighting bigger boys or dogs") to the rarely applicable
("Expect to put on weight after Stockholm"). While it is not clear
exactly to whom the lessons are directed, they do serve to point out
the highlights of a colorful journey.

By his own account, Watson's Chicago upbringing was dominated by a
belief in "books, birds, and the Democratic party." His father,
James, Sr., was a devoted naturalist who took his son on pre-dawn
walks to spot the seasonal birds in Jackson Park--and on Friday-night
trips to the local public library. His mother Margaret was a
Democratic organizer in Chicago's seventh ward, and James, Jr. was
raised a partisan of Roosevelt and the New Deal. Each of these family
convictions, as it turned out, played a role in shaping Watson's
subsequent life and career.

It was his interest in birds that led him to plan for a career in
biology, which became the focus of his studies as an undergraduate at
the University of Chicago. But he abandoned ornithology shortly after
beginning his graduate training at Indiana University, where he was
seduced instead by the increasingly evident promise of genetics.
Around the same time, he swapped bird- for girl-watching.

The subsequent two decades--representing the bulk of the time covered
in Avoid Boring People--seem to have been dominated by the twin
obsessions of solving the mysteries of the genetic code, on the one
hand, and "finding a suitable blonde," on the other. Between the two
there is a lot of ground to cover, and Watson's narrative moves
seamlessly from highly specialized discourse to slightly prurient
natter and back again, often without any pause to provide a sense of
context or consequence. Interestingly, he seems to recall his romantic
dalliances in at least as much detail as his experimental work. In
one scene he is lunching with a pretty socialite; in the next he is
hard at work on the structure of ribosomes.

Even at what was arguably the apogee of his scientific career,
genetics did not appear to occupy the forefront of Watson's mind. To
hear him tell it, the high points of his time in Stockholm were the
flower-bedecked girl who woke him on the last day of Nobel Week and
his brief visit with Sweden's Princess Christina, whom he persuaded
to apply to Radcliffe. Although a future for Watson and the princess
was not to be, six years after winning the Nobel he married a
Radcliffe girl twenty years his junior.

DEMOCRATIC-PARTY politics proved a somewhat more durable pastime than
birding. Like many academics of his generation, Watson was a Kennedy
partisan, and he established his liberal bona fides with a brief
stint on the President's science-advisory committee. His role ended
during the Johnson administration, when he crossed the military by
opposing the use of an encephalitis virus as a bio-weapon.
Henceforth, his political activities were somewhat less conspicuous.
As for books, the role they played in influencing Watson's
intellectual development is perhaps the most edifying detail in Avoid
Boring People. In high school he read Sinclair Lewis's Arrowsmith
(1925), a novel about a brilliant scientist who tries to cure cholera
with bacteria-killing viruses. The lesson, duly provided at the end
of the chapter: "find a young hero to emulate." Indeed, Watson would
eventually achieve the kind of success that eludes the fictional
Martin Arrowsmith. As an undergraduate at the University of Chicago,
he read Erwin Schrodinger's What Is Life? and came to believe that an
understanding of the gene was the key to understanding all of
biology. This is what set him on his path to graduate training in
genetics, and hence to glory.

But the most consequential books for Watson were, naturally, the ones
he wrote himself, and above all The Double Helix. He began writing
this first memoir in 1962, assisted, predictably, by a blue-
eyed "muse" from Radcliffe. His catty opening line--"I have never
seen Francis Crick in a modest mood"--was destined to become a
classic quote in the history of science. It also prefigured the
scandals that surrounded the book's eventual publication.

Watson's unflattering portrayal of Crick, the British molecular
biologist who was his principal collaborator, precipitated a very
public falling-out, accompanied by threats of legal action. Nor was
Maurice Wilkins, the crystallographer who shared the Nobel prize with
Watson and Crick, impressed by the self-aggrandizement on display in
The Double Helix. Watson was also taken to task for his description
of Wilkins's co-worker Rosalind Franklin, who had died prematurely of
ovarian cancer in 1958. Although it was her work that proved crucial
to solving the structure of DNA, she struck Watson as dour,
unimaginative, and unattractive.

Watson later recanted these aspersions, acknowledging Franklin's
contribution and saying that only in time had he come to appreciate
her intelligence and determination. Still, the fact remains that he
and Crick had used Franklin's unpublished work without her knowledge.
ALMOST EVERY autobiography invites its reader to wonder why an author
might feel the need to record, and to submit for public inspection,
the details of his life. Watson himself avers that "a major reason
for writing autobiography is to prevent later biographers getting the
basic facts of your life wrong." But since he has already written two
other memoirs that between them cover his major accomplishments and
many of his diversions in fairly exhaustive detail, this begs the
question of which basic facts he is concerned about. Surely he is not
worried that future biographers will neglect his first girlfriend at
Indiana.

One possibility is that Watson, now almost eighty, could simply not
pass up the opportunity to have the last word on the discovery of the
double helix. His re-telling of the story occupies about nineteen
pages of Avoid Boring People. In the crucial paragraph, he claims
that Maurice Wilkins impulsively showed him an unpublished X-ray
photo of a DNA molecule from Rosalind Franklin's laboratory,
thereby providing the key piece of data that would enable Watson and
Crick to uncover DNA's double helical structure. And why did Wilkins
show him the photo?

For no other reason, Watson suggests, than to prove that Franklin
was "badly delud[ed]" in her belief that the genetic material could
not be a helix.

Unfortunately, Wilkins and Crick both died in 2004. On this point, we
have only Watson's word.

FOR THE rest, if any theme can be discerned amid the miscellany of
genetics, gossip, and girl-gazing of Avoid Boring People, it is that
a scientist's career is shaped by the company he keeps. Watson had
the good fortune to arrive at Indiana not long after the university
had managed to recruit some of the brightest lights in American
genetics. These included Salvador Luria, Tracy Sonneborn, and Hermann
J. Muller--three men whose career prospects at elite East Coast
universities had been hindered by their common Jewish heritage, and
in the case of Luria and Muller, by their left-wing politics.

The sense of being on the cutting edge that pervaded Luria's lab
clearly left a deep impression on Watson. Moreover, it was through
Luria (and his polymath collaborator Max Delbruck) that Watson was
initiated into the circle of scientists that brought him successively
to Cold Spring Harbor, Caltech, Copenhagen, and Cambridge University
in England. At Cambridge he found himself in the midst of what were
then some of the most productive laboratories in the world, and it
was there, too, that he met Wilkins, Franklin, and Crick.

A corollary is thus that institutions matter as well, as do the
people who run them. Watson idealizes his undergraduate college and
its philosopher-president Robert Hutchins; it was at Chicago, by his
reckoning, that he learned how to think--and, just as importantly,
how to "call crap crap" (a training that does not seem to have been
accompanied by lessons in tact). The laboratories at Cold Spring
Harbor functioned in turn as a meeting-place and incubator for the
pioneers of molecular genetics; under the four decades of Watson's
leadership, they would grow into an important nucleus of research in
biology's emerging fields. His recipe for success in this regard:
build attractive buildings, have wealthy neighbors, and stay friendly
with your trustees.

The institution for which Watson reserves most of his rhetorical bile
is, ironically, the one at which he spent the majority of his
productive career--namely, Harvard. Watson came to Harvard in the
1956 in hopes of helping to make it a leader in the life sciences,
but clearly felt that this was an uphill battle. The chairman of the
biology department when he arrived was "pedantic," the
faculty "pedestrian"; with a few exceptions, his colleagues were
"prima donnas whose meager accomplishments scarcely even justified
the status of has-been." Worst of all was the university's
pusillanimous president, Nathan Pusey, whom Watson derides as an
intellectually undistinguished ass. The institution's one saving
grace for Watson seems to have been its students--particularly, one
gathers, its blonde female students. As he observes, "princesses
don't go to Caltech."

ALTHOUGH WATSON left Harvard in 1975, around where Avoid Boring
People leaves off, he returns to it in the epilogue, offering his
cantankerous take both on the future of the university's science
departments and on the brief and stormy presidential tenure of
Lawrence Summers, who also found himself under fire for political
incorrectness.

But Watson is no Summers. The problem is not that his outbursts are
politically incorrect; it is not even that they are often empirically
incorrect. The problem is, rather, that he appears altogether
oblivious of the distinction between empirical claims and normative
assertions. The fact, for example, that we can screen for certain
genetic variants does not imply that we must do so--much less that we
should embrace eugenics as a matter of social policy, as Watson has
loudly advocated.

Boring Watson may not be. But in using his Nobel-laureate status as a
means of justifying any number of scandalous and scientifically
questionable pronouncements about human genetics, neither is he
merely an ill tempered crank. It may therefore be for the best if,
having written Avoid Boring People, he were to decide that he has
said enough.

* Avoid Boring People: Lessons From a Life in Science. Knopf, 368 pp.
$26.95.

KEVIN SHAPIRO is a research fellow in neuroscience and a student at
Harvard Medical School.