The second of the publication of the DNA double helix construction was, on the similar time, the top of a protracted — and generally tragic — race, and the start of the age of DNA sequencing and genetic engineering; along with AI, one of the vital promising and most harmful applied sciences of our age.
The guide and the reality
In his guide “The Double Helix,” James D. Watson, one of many two scientists who’re primarily credited with the invention, provides a humorous, entertaining, generally breathtaking, and really memorable account of how he and his colleagues got here up with the construction of the DNA molecule. I should have learn this guide over thirty years in the past, and I nonetheless have a vivid reminiscence of all of the characters and main plot factors.
Regardless of (or maybe due to) the leisure that the guide is, it has been attacked from many sides. Francis Crick, the opposite half of the duo who found the DNA construction, said (Wikipedia) that the guide was only a “contemptible pack of damned nonsense.” That is no marvel when one reads how Watson describes his colleague Crick on the very starting of the guide:
I’ve by no means seen Francis Crick in a modest temper. Maybe in different firm he’s that manner, however I’ve by no means had motive so to guage him. It has nothing to do together with his current fame. … At the moment [1951], he was thirty-five, but virtually completely unknown. Though a few of his closest colleagues realized the worth of his fast, penetrating thoughts and continuously sought his recommendation, he was usually not appreciated, and most of the people thought he talked an excessive amount of. (The Double Helix)
Though Watson acknowledges from the beginning that the invention of the DNA had been the work of 5 folks, Maurice Wilkins, Rosalind Franklin, Linus Pauling, Francis Crick, and himself, he goes on to color his personal contribution in a a lot brighter gentle than any of the others’. He’s particularly dismissive of the work of Rosalind Franklin, who was the one girl related to the invention, and who, sadly, died earlier than she could possibly be awarded an element within the Nobel prize that Watson, Crick and Wilkins shared.
James Watson’s personal account of the invention of the construction of the DNA molecule is an unforgettable science journey story. Entertaining as a lot as it’s controversial, it ought to be within the library of any particular person within the historical past of science.
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The scientist and the person
The invention of the DNA construction led to what we at present know as the sector of genetic engineering and the flexibility of human beings to not solely establish criminals by means of DNA assessments, but additionally to detect hereditary illnesses earlier than start, to create new crops which might be immune to illnesses or that contain added vitamins and to carry out a large number of different miracles.
Nevertheless it additionally ushered in a world the place we’re in a position to engineer lethal pathogens, the place we are able to make goats produce spider silk, the place folks may be uniquely fingerprinted from only a few cells, and the place we are able to clone sheep and, virtually definitely, additionally people.
The person James D. Watson himself is an efficient instance of the two-faced blessings of recent science. An excellent and demanding scientist, he has, nonetheless, been sorely missing in frequent sense and a broader understanding of the world and its points. He has all the time been praised for his scientific work, however his ideas on politics weren’t extra developed than, for instance, this 2007 assertion: “I turned in opposition to the left wing as a result of they don’t like genetics, as a result of genetics implies that generally in life we fail as a result of now we have dangerous genes. They need all failure in life to be because of the evil system.” [1] He has voiced equally deep opinions about “fats folks,” girls and homosexuals, amongst different points. In 2003, he mentioned: “Folks say it could be horrible if we made all women fairly. I believe it could be nice.” (Supply: Wikipedia)
Following comparable feedback on racial points, some establishments in recent times withdrew the honorary titles they’d bestowed on him.
This text will not be about James D Watson, however I discover that he illustrates effectively one of many issues of recent science: the intense specialisation behind each area of examine has created an elite of people who find themselves extraordinarily highly effective, whose work can be extraordinarily helpful, however who additionally usually fully lack the flexibility to grasp the world exterior of their very own little bubble of the scientific universe. Whoever has labored in academia certainly is aware of many such women and men.
Hermann Hesse’s ‘The Glass Bead Recreation’ might be his biggest novel, his deepest, most intriguing, most hackerish in spirit. It combines a concept of historical past and schooling with classes in Zen, meditations on the enduring energy of establishments, friendship, responsibility and excellence.
Given the ability that science has to vary and even to destroy all our lives, we should ask ourselves whether or not we actually need scientists like that (and there are definitely extra of them) to be in charge of a lot of our worldwide science — and, in impact, of our frequent future.
Because the German author Hermann Hesse wrote in his wonderfully deep and intelligent novel “The Glass Bead Recreation” (German: Das Glasperlenspiel, 1943):
We love the sciences, every one in all us their very own, however we additionally know that devotion to a science doesn’t shield a person from selfishness, vice and ridiculousness…
And he goes on to suggest that scientists ought to stay in monastic-style communities and dedicate half their time to science and the opposite half to meditation and religious practices.
A magical imaginative and prescient of a world rebuilt after ours has destroyed itself. Half utopia, half historic treatise, half psychological examination, The Glass Bead Recreation is a grand journey in literary creativeness.
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One is left to wonder if molecular biology and genetic engineering, along with the remainder of our society, wouldn’t be higher off in the event that they have been within the fingers of a caste of meditating monks — or whether or not now we have to resign ourselves to a scientific institution that’s led by the type of people that found DNA’s double helix and who now rule our world.
Pleased birthday, genetic engineering!
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[1] John H. Richardson. “James Watson – Discovery of DNA construction – James Watson on the Double Helix”. Esquire. Retrieved June 29, 2015. Quoted after Wikipedia.
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