Genes, Girls and Gamow

This memoir, a sequel to Watson's earlier The Double Helix, chronicles the years following the 1953 discovery of DNA's structure, tracing Watson's scientific pursuit of RNA and the genetic code alongside his turbulent personal life as a young scientist searching for love.

The book opens with a prologue set in September 1986. Watson returned to Cambridge, England, and visited the Cavendish Laboratory office where he and Francis Crick once worked, finding a student measuring potatoes with no awareness of the room's significance. He reflects with sadness that Cambridge seemed indifferent to the intellectual era Crick dominated.

The narrative returns to April 1953, weeks after Watson and Crick discovered the double-helical structure of DNA, the molecule carrying genetic information in all living cells. Watson recounts the backstory: his arrival at the Cavendish in 1951 as a young American postdoctoral fellow, the rivalry with researchers Maurice Wilkins and Rosalind Franklin at King's College London, and the botched triple-helix model by Linus Pauling, then the world's most famous chemist, which opened the door for Watson and Crick. Their model, completed in March 1953, revealed DNA's complementary base-pairing structure, solving the problems of what genes look like and how they replicate.

Watson turned to the next great problem: how genetic information in DNA directs the assembly of proteins. He and Crick reasoned that DNA's information must first be copied into ribonucleic acid (RNA), which would travel to the cell's cytoplasm, the material surrounding the nucleus, to order amino acids into proteins. George Gamow, a celebrated Russian-born physicist famous for his work on the Big Bang, wrote to them identifying the same challenge and proposing a number-theory approach.

Watson's personal life proved far harder to solve. In June 1953, at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory on Long Island, he reconnected with Christa Mayr, the 17-year-old daughter of ornithologist Ernst Mayr, recently appointed Professor of Zoology at Harvard. Watson found Christa transformed from a gangly child into a confident young woman. On his last night at the laboratory, they sat together on the beach at dawn, and he realized he was in love.

That fall, Watson moved to the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in Pasadena to collaborate on RNA X-ray diffraction with Alex Rich, a postdoctoral fellow in Pauling's lab, but early results were disappointing. He found Pasadena stifling and faced months of anxiety over the U.S. Army draft. In January 1954, he met Gamow in Washington, D.C. Gamow presented a code scheme in which proteins assemble directly on DNA; Watson objected that RNA must be the intermediary. When Gamow visited Caltech in February, Watson proposed they form the RNA Tie Club, limited to 20 members (one for each amino acid), united by custom neckties Gamow designed and a shared desire to crack the genetic code.

Watson's pursuit of Christa lurched between hope and despair. He visited her at Swarthmore College in spring 1954, but they parted as friends. That summer at the Marine Biological Laboratory at Woods Hole, on Cape Cod, Watson distributed fake party invitations from Gamow advertising a "Wiskie-Twistie" RNA party; Gamow agreed to host the event for real. Coding discussions with Crick, Sydney Brenner (a South African medical graduate who would later join Crick in Cambridge), and Gamow proved stimulating but inconclusive. At the party, Watson met a young woman but pulled back from a romantic encounter, unable to stop thinking about Christa. Weeks later, at the Mayrs' New Hampshire farm, he and Christa began kissing, and they became quietly a couple.

Back at Caltech, Watson and Leslie Orgel, an Oxford theoretical chemist, built molecular models exploring how DNA might template RNA synthesis. Watson had an insight that RNA might form with an inherently unstable backbone that would automatically peel away from the DNA template. Pauling found the idea promising but cautioned against premature publication. In mid-March 1955, Harvard's Biology Department offered Watson an Assistant Professorship, with his first year on sabbatical at Cambridge. He accepted.

Watson returned to the Cavendish in July 1955, settling into a garret room at Clare College. After a month on the continent that included Alpine walking and a warm flirtation in Geneva, he traveled to Freiburg, Germany, and found Christa at her relatives' home. She joined him in England, and they drove north into Scotland in a tiny Morris Minor. Their first nights together were awkward, but by the Cluanie Inn on the road to Skye they found physical ease. They stayed at Carradale House in Kintyre with the family of Watson's friend Avrion Mitchison. Avrion's mother, the celebrated novelist Naomi Mitchison, pronounced Christa charming but questioned whether Watson really wanted someone whose wings were too fragile for steady flight.

The relationship frayed through the fall. A visit to Christa in Munich was strained, and her letters grew less frequent. The climactic blow came over the Christmas holidays at the Mitchisons' Carradale estate. Christa told Watson she was not in love with him and knew she always would feel this way. His letters of emotional outpouring had made her feel trapped; she wanted a bigger cage. Naomi advised Watson to get Christa out of his mind. On New Year's Eve, he kissed her at midnight, but her face went blank. The next morning he accompanied her to Victoria Station, his last memory her sleepless face disappearing into the train.

Watson's recovery unfolded amid Cambridge dramas. Peter Pauling, Linus's son, was expelled from Peterhouse after Julia Lewis, a Girton College undergraduate, became pregnant by him and he refused to marry her; he was forced into a hasty civil wedding. Watson and Linda Pauling, Linus's daughter, hosted a lively party in college rooms. Watson befriended Belinda Bullard, a spirited Girton biochemistry student, and sneaked with her into the Clare May Ball. As dawn broke, he was not unhappy: Christa was no longer his expected companion.

In spring 1956, Watson achieved a crystallographic success when X-ray patterns from polyadenylic acid, a synthetic RNA-like molecule, revealed it to be a double helix. He traveled to Israel for a scientific meeting and continued to Egypt before contracting dysentery. That summer at Cold Spring Harbor, Christa's sister Susie delivered devastating news: Christa was pregnant by a German engineering student and planned to marry him. Watson saw Christa one final time; she was calm and certain. He drove to Harvard's Biological Laboratories and walked through Harvard Yard in the fading evening light, accepting that the fall evening marked the beginning of his new life.

The epilogue traces the following dozen years. Messenger RNA and transfer RNA were understood by 1960, and the genetic code was cracked by 1966. Watson, Crick, and Wilkins shared the 1962 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine. Watson's mother died suddenly in 1957. Watson wrote The Double Helix, published in 1968, and became Director of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. Gamow remarried but died in 1968 at age 64 from liver failure related to alcohol use. In 1967, Watson met Elizabeth Lewis, a Radcliffe sophomore. On March 28, 1968, they were quietly married in a La Jolla church with the polymath Jacob Bronowski as best man. Leslie Orgel, present at the reception, refused to believe it was real.