“Francis Crick, the Nobel Prize-winning father of modern genetics, was under the influence of LSD when he first deduced the double-helix structure of DNA nearly 50 years ago. “The abrasive and unorthodox Crick and his brilliant American co-researcher James Watson famously celebrated their eureka moment in March 1953 by running from the now legendary Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge to the nearby Eagle pub, where they announced over pints of bitter that they had discovered the secret of life….”

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Comment:

Yeah, yeah, yeah…

The genius Crick on crack — what a crock.

There’s another story there that’s more interesting and much darker…

The greater part of the credit for the discovery should actually go to the brilliant Rosalind Franklin, at the time about 30-31. Franklin died at only 37, cutting short a highly productive career. At least, Crick had the grace to eventually concede that she was two steps away from the double helix (can we trust that concession, I wonder). Watson actually trashed her in a vainglorious account of his own genius.

I first saw the film, The Double Helix, when I was booted out of Heathrow – for having forgotten my green card – at the interesting hour of 1 PM in London. Sent to a rather curious establishment run by the younger son of a Marathi businessman – who confided in me that he could sneak me into the London population, undetected, for the right sum, if I wished. Having neither the sum nor the wish, I managed to invite myself to friends of a friend whom I vaguely recalled lived somewhere near Kensington. The friends of the friend were as kind as they were bright – she, a psychiatrist, he a researcher at the Cavendish lab.

“Oh, Cavendish – Watson and Crick! Double helix!” I said with the gush that the not-faintly-scientific reserve for the annointed ones of modern society. That’s when I learned about Rosalind Franklin and the theft of her work.

“In [The Double Helix by James Watson] he tells about how happy they were, he and Crick, that my husband was not allowed to come because had he come, he would no doubt have seen these excellent photographs that Rosalind Franklin made and had and which, when they saw them, with their other data, they were able to work out the structure of DNA…[If] ever there was a woman who was mistreated, it was Rosalind Franklin, and she didn’t get the notice that she should have gotten for her work on DNA.”

– Ava Helen Pauling, interview with Lee Herzenberg, Sept. 1977

We think of intellectual elites as somehow purer than financial or political elites. We see them as untouched by the same temptations. Above the usual vices. It may be time to become more realistic. And to question the people and the practices in the temple of science.

Idols of the cave?