Watson seems more tempered this time around, especially in the treatment of Rosalind Franklin. But the urge to reveal all...
Part memoir, part love story, part homage to the brilliant physicist George (“Geo,” pronounced Joe) Gamow, this is another tell-all tale in the tradition of The Double Helix.
Yes, Watson is at it again, recalling the turbulent decade that followed the world-shaking 1953 publication of the Watson-Crick model of DNA. Watson was then 25, unmarried, restless, and eager—not only to capture a bride, but also to nail the next scientific triumph—to show how information coded in the DNA in a cell’s nucleus gets out into the cell body to direct the production of proteins. That story is told in an intricate chain of events intertwined with the pursuit of one Christa Pauling, Linus’s beautiful daughter. Into this double helix winds yet a third chain—in the form of on-again, off-again appearances of the brilliant, irrepressible, and hard-drinking George Gamow. It was Gamow who conceived the notion that amino acids could be specified by a triplet code. The four bases of DNA taken three at a time would allow 64 (4X4X4) combinations of letters—more than enough to code for the 20 odd amino acids. It was Gamow who also playfully established the RNA-tie club with Watson, since RNA would play a key role. In the end, the combined efforts of a pantheon of greats and graduate students on both sides of the Atlantic led to the initial cracking of the code by Marshall Nirenberg in 1961. By that time the reader will have tracked Watson in endless commutes between the two Cambridges, Cold Spring Harbor, Caltech, and the like. As well, we will have trekked with him on climbing tours across England and the continent in the company of colleagues, often equally in pursuit of girls. The epilogue draws the chains to their conclusion—the brilliant triumph of the science, the sad early death of Geo, and a happy ending for the author, though not with Christa.
Watson seems more tempered this time around, especially in the treatment of Rosalind Franklin. But the urge to reveal all will surely upset a few who may not see it that way at all.Pub Date: Feb. 5, 2002
ISBN: 0-375-41283-2
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2001
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
IN THE NEWS
A fascinating chapter in earliest American history, and an example of how far-reaching the ramifications of federal law can...
A gripping account of the discovery and subsequent controversy that surrounded Kennewick Man, a 9,500-year-old skeleton found in the Pacific Northwest.
Anthropologist and forensic consultant Chatters was minding the shop in 1996 when the Benton County coroner came calling with a skull discovered in the nearby Columbia River in Washington state. Although the formation of the jaw and brow suggested to Chatters that the skull was that of a Caucasian (perhaps an early settler in the region who died a century ago), there was a puzzle in the form of an arrowhead (a projectile of a type that’s been out of use for many thousands of years) lodged in the skeleton’s pelvis. Radiocarbon dating revealed the astounding age of the bones; Kennewick Man was one of the most complete skeletons ever discovered from such a remote period. However, his age put him square in the middle of a controversy. Was Kennewick Man, a Caucasoid skeleton not traceable to any existing tribe, subject to the 1990 Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act? If so, he would have to be reburied immediately, with no further scientific examinations. As Chatters relates the case, it is a striking example of how bureaucracy can be manipulated—in this case, by the Army Corps of Engineers and the local tribes who seized and held the skeleton, exhausting deadline after deadline for performing its own studies. After four years of delay, Interior Secretary Bruce Babbit found for the tribes, at which point Chatters and eight other scientists sued for the right to examine the skeleton (this “ancient American fossil that even the government’s own experts admit needs to be studied”) before its reburial. Chatters, with true scientific curiosity, then moves into headier subject matter, advancing theories of how Kennewick Man came to be in the Americas, what his society might have been like, and what the projectile in his pelvis might suggest about human conflict in a remote age often painted as idyllic.
A fascinating chapter in earliest American history, and an example of how far-reaching the ramifications of federal law can be.Pub Date: June 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-684-85936-X
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2001
Policy, popular culture, and genetics meet in this intelligent critique of our society's search for easy answers. Genetic essentialism is on the rise, contend Nelkin (Sociology/New York Univ.; The Creation Controversy, 1982, etc.) and Lindee (Sociology of Science/Univ. of Pennsylvania; Suffering Made Real, not reviewed). They argue convincingly that while the science of genetics doesn't offer conclusive biological information, it is shaping us culturally and being used to justify conservative social policy: If everything from intelligence and sexual orientation to alcoholism and violence is inherited, then problems can be controlled, ``not through the uncertain route of social reform, but through biological manipulation.'' The authors' assessment of genetics' dangerous social potential may sound like Orwellian alarmism, but they draw on solidly familiar examples from American popular culture, including television, movies, books, and the media (they cite, for instance, a TV movie, Tainted Blood, that posits homicidal tendencies being passed from mother to child). The book is also impressively up-to-date on the political front, bringing health insurance, adoption surrogacy, welfare reform, and concern about the family into the picture. This broad range of examples reflects the gene's remarkable currency—a power gained, Nelkin and Lindee claim, by the malleability of its potential. Culturally, the gene is conceived as everything from the computer chip of personal identity to the ``secular equivalent of the Christian soul.'' These assumptions bear frightening resemblance to the beliefs of the American eugenics movement in the early 1900s, say the authors, who point to a reemergence of social intolerance and blame. An important, timely commentary on the manipulation of scientific inquiry in the interest of political ideology.
Pub Date: April 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-7167-2709-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1995
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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