| The Magazine of the CALIFORNIA ACADEMY OF SCIENCES |
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| Counterpoints in Science Watson's Will James Watson, co-discoverer of the molecular structure of DNA, was in San Francisco last February, just as the complete human genome was being published. I interviewed him and asked how he felt about this celebrated event. He said, “The genome is just the script for 30,000 actors, the genes that determine our proteins. If you tried to watch a play with that many characters, it would be pretty confusing. It’s going to take quite a while to sort out what it all means.” The next night he was speaking to a full house at the Herbst Auditorium for a colloquium sponsored by the California Academy of Sciences. When asked whether he would favor genetic engineering of the human genome, he replied that he would not oppose it. “Imagine if we could banish stupidity,” he said, drawing a roar of laughter. James Watson has always been controversial. The Nobel Prize recipient, best-selling author, and first director of the Human Genome Project says what he thinks, and at 73 is still going strong, riling sensitivities left and right with his uncensored opinions. Watson grew up in Chicago, was one of the original radio Quiz Kids, and entered the University of Chicago at age 15. He writes in his new book, A Passion for DNA (Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press, 2000) that since the University of Chicago was not as old as Harvard, “I saw no reason to treat authority with much reverence. You were never held back by manners, and crap was best called crap. Offending somebody was always preferable to avoiding the truth, although such bluntness did not make me a social success with most of my classmates....It was Chicago that first taught me that I had to be different from others if later I was to succeed.” After reading physicist Erwin Schrö-dinger’s book What is Life?, Watson gave up bird-watching to try to solve the mystery of the gene. After graduate work at the University of Indiana, he traveled to Europe on fellowship. He soon decided that the real action in gene research was the X-ray crystallography taking place at Cambridge University, England, where he joined the Cavendish Laboratory. There he met Francis Crick, a physicist-turned-biologist who, like Watson, was obsessed with discovering the structure of DNA. The rest, of course, is history. In 1953, Watson and Crick figured out that DNA is a double helix. It was immediately recognized as the most important breakthrough in biology since Darwin’s theory of evolution. The discovery of the structure of DNA unveiled the mechanics of gene replication and inheritance, made it possible to crack the genetic code that all living things share, set the foundations of cloning and genetically manipulating plants and animals, and opened new pathways for understanding and treating genetic diseases. Few scientists are able to write the definitive history of their own discovery, but Watson had literary as well as scientific ambitions. He particularly admired F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. He writes in A Passion for DNA “I also had a good story to tell, and thought that with effort it might read like a Fitzgerald novel. Jay Gatsby was partly a fraud, and while I hadn’t a bootlegger past, there were some scientists who thought I wasn’t much above it.” The reading public loved The Double Helix, which recounts the personalities and the drive to be first to unravel the secret of the gene. It may be the most widely read book about science ever written. Watson told the Herbst audience that he is prouder of writing this book than of discovering the structure of DNA, because only he could have authored it, but someone else would have deciphered DNA within a few years. In the book’s foreword, Sir Lawrence Bragg, head of the Cavendish Laboratory when Watson worked there, warns, “He writes with a Pepys-like frankness. Those who figure in the book must read it in a very forgiving spirit.” Yet Watson’s closest associates were not very forgiving after reading about their part in the story. Crick felt angry and betrayed, and their intimate friendship cooled for several years. Maurice Wilkins, who ultimately shared the Nobel Prize with Watson and Crick, reviled the memoir and mocked its thesis as: “I’m Jim. I’m smart. Most of the time Francis is smart too. The rest are bloody clods.” Rosalind Franklin, the X-ray crystallographer who worked in Wilkins’ lab at the University College London, is a major protagonist in The Double Helix and has become a cause celebre among feminists as a classic case of a woman who did not receive the credit she deserved. Whenever Watson is interviewed publicly, a woman in the audience asks with an edge in her voice if he doesn’t think that Franklin got cheated. The Herbst audience was no exception. But “Rosy,” according to all accounts, not just Watson’s, refused to consult or communicate with anyone else about her research. While Watson and Crick were convinced that DNA was some kind of helix, Franklin, who actually had the best X-ray pictures, was equally convinced that it was not a helix and grew angry with Watson when he suggested that it was. When Wilkins showed Watson one of Franklin’s photos, Watson instantly recognized the evidence of a helical pattern. On this basis, Watson and Crick were able to unravel the mysterious structure, while Franklin, still working in isolation, continued to puzzle over the meaning of her own pictures. In answering the inevitable question about Franklin, Watson emphasizes the importance of cooperation in science, the need to rub other minds against your own and point out mistakes before too much time is wasted on them. Unfortunately, Franklin died young of ovarian cancer several years before the Nobels were handed out to Watson, Crick, and Wilkins, so we’ll never know whether the Nobel Committee would have annointed her. They do not give posthumous awards. Science historian Horace Judson wrote, “The strangest character in the pursuit of DNA is the one Watson created in The Double Helix for himself to hide behind: bumptious brilliance, sure-footed gawkiness, Midwestern American youth in Europe back then before youth fares, growing his hair longer long before long hair.” But perhaps Watson didn’t see himself too differently from the way others saw him. Francois Jacob, a French geneticist and Nobelist, found Watson in his early twenties “an amazing character. Tall, gawky, scraggly, he had an inimitable style. Inimitable in his dress; shirttails flying, knees in the air, socks down around his ankles....A surprising mixture of awkwardness and shrewdness. Of childishness in the things of life and maturity in those of science.” Today, Watson is tall and slender, bald on top with a halo of white hair, alert and quick in conversation. He speaks softly and tends to mumble, often ending a remark by smiling and opening his eyes wide to punctuate his statements. An equal-opportunity gadfly, Watson offends the right as well as the left. He once asked his former graduate advisor, Nobel Laureate Salvador Luria, why he never criticized his left-wing friends for putting forth scientifically dishonest statements. When Luria replied that politics was more important than science, Watson was horrified. Luria had escaped first from Italy and then from France during World War II and worried, like many geneticists of his generation, that DNA manipulations might raise accusations of Nazi eugenics and racial purity. “But past eugenic horrors,” Watson writes, “in no way justify the ‘not in our genes’ politically correct outlook of many left-wing academics. They still spread the unwarranted message that only our bodies, not our minds, have genetic origins.” Watson advocates the techniques of human genetics to identify and treat genes that predispose some people to mental disorders such as schizophrenia, and sees genetic diseases as random tragedies that we should try to prevent. “Terminating a genetically disabled fetus is incomparably more compassionate than allowing an infant to come into the world tragically impaired,” Watson says. In the early 1970s, Watson joined other concerned geneticists at Asilomar to set up guidelines for handling recombinant DNA, lest some dangerous organism emerge and devastate the countryside. After a few years, no recombinant-DNA worker had suffered an illness, no organism had “escaped,” and many scientists concluded the threat had been largely imaginary. Watson then recommended at a National Institute of Health hearing that the Asilomar guidelines be abandoned. He recalls that an environmental lawyer demanded that he prove recombinant DNA was safe. Watson looked at him and said, “How do I know that you are not a paid killer sent by the Commies to do in our science?” The lawyer reminded Watson that he, Watson, had helped set up the guidelines and so should continue to enforce them. Watson said, “Just because I was a jackass then is no reason for you to continue to be one.” According to Watson, DNA shouldn’t be feared. “Compared to almost any other object that starts with the letter D, DNA is very safe indeed,” Watson told me. “Far better to worry about daggers, dynamite, dogs, dieldrin, dioxin, or drunken drivers than to draw up Rube Goldberg schemes on how our laboratory-made DNA will lead to the extinction of the human race.” When I mentioned Jeremy Rifkind and the movement against genetically modified organisms, Watson replied, “Jeremy Rifkind was against the Bicentennial Celebration too—said it was elitist. Those people who destroy fields of genetically modified organisms are denying reality. How can anyone oppose plants that reduce the use of pesticides and feed more people?” Having been an avid bird-watcher in his youth, Watson never expected to find himself at loggerheads with the environmental movement. Then, Watson told me, “When I was on sabbatical at Stanford in 1977, David Brower came out against recombinant DNA.” Today, “anything the Sierra Club is for, I’m against. They’re professional agitators. They think genes are bad.” Lest he leave any sensitivities unruffled, last year Watson gave a talk at the University of California at Berkeley that was reported in the San Francisco Chronicle under the headline: Nobel Winner’s Theories Raise Uproar In Berkeley; Geneticist’s Views Strike Many As Racist, Sexist. Reporter Tom Abate wrote that Watson had suggested biochemical links between skin color and sexual activity and between thinness and ambition in a lecture entitled “The Pursuit of Happiness: Lessons from pom-C.” Pom-C is a protein that helps create three different hormones: One determines skin color (melanin); another enhances a sense of well-being (beta endorphins); and the third plays a role in fat metabolism (leptin). Watson wondered out loud why evolution had linked these hormones, and whether the interrelationship of these mood- and behavior-influencing compounds might be affected by exposure to sunlight. He described an experiment at the University of Arizona in which male patients were injected with an extract of melanin to test whether it would darken the men’s skin as a protection against skin cancer. Instead, the men developed erections that lasted for several hours. The result suggested to Watson that sunshine makes people happy and sexy. “That’s why you have Latin lovers,” he told the audience. “You’ve never heard of an English lover. Only an English patient.” He showed a slide of sad-faced model Kate Moss to demonstrate that thin people are unhappy. He said that thin people are more ambitious and make better workers, but fat people may be more sexual because their bloodstreams contain higher levels of leptin. “Whenever you interview fat people, you feel bad, because you know you’re not going to hire them.” He then showed a slide of a Rubens painting of a plump, happy, sexy nude. Predictably, these remarks outraged some members of the Berkeley audience, and reporter Abate made it clear that he agreed with their condemnation of Watson. But in a follow-up article a month later, he reported with chagrin that a majority of readers sided with Watson and belittled his “politically correct” critics. “These brats all need a good spanking,” wrote one. “You are what you are, even if you’re afraid to admit it.” It seems the tide of public opinion has turned toward genetics in the past few years, and molecular biology, the science of which Watson is a founding father, is the rising moon that has turned the tide. Every day, people read in the newspapers about new successes in mapping and manipulating the human genome and identifying genes for such crippling diseases as hemophilia, cystic fibrosis, muscular dystrophy, and Huntington’s disease. “One purpose of sequencing the genome is to speed up our understanding of genes, their role in such conditions as cancer and psychiatric disease,” Watson told me. “Most people realize that many personality factors and intelligence may also have a genetic basis. The discussion of these matters is only taboo in academia and the press. They hate the gene.” In model organisms like the roundworm and the fruit-fly, genes conferring longevity have been identified, and animals genetically engineered with an extra longevity gene could live twice as long as the normal ones. I asked Watson if he sees any ethical problems with doing this kind of genetic engineering on humans. “We’re animals, and like all other animals, we don’t want to die. When I was young, I worried about the origin of life. Now I worry about the origins of disease,” he said. “I see nothing wrong with prolonging life if the individual is actively involved and not suffering or senile. I would certainly be against it for people with Alzheimer’s, who can’t take care of themselves or enjoy life or recognize anyone—like Ronald Reagan at 90.” Human cloning, which he once opposed, is no longer a top concern, Watson said at Herbst Auditorium. Younger people, he said, might be more concerned because it was more likely to happen in their lifetime. Someone in the audience then asked him what his top concerns were. “Cancer and senility,” Watson answered, and the crowd laughed sympathetically. Senility doesn’t appear an immediate threat to James Watson. He remains an American original, the outspoken enfant terrible who helped open Pandora’s double-locked box, radically altered the world we live in, and continues to tell that world exactly what he thinks of it.
Jerold M. Lowenstein is professor of medicine at the University of California in San Francisco and chairman of the Department of Nuclear Medicine at California Pacific Medical Center in San Francisco. jlowen@itsa.ucsf.edu |
Summer 2001
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