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JF07-National Copy.Indd California, Santa Cruz, said that Watson had painted a picture of the scientific en- deavor as a “clawing climb up a slippery slope, impeded by the authority of fools, to be made with cadged data…,with malice toward most and charity toward none.” In fact, Watson’s reputation for poor manners long preceded The Double Helix. Al- luding to bruising encounters in the 1950s over the proper agenda for Harvard biology, entomologist E.O. Wilson, now Pellegrino University Professor emeritus, famously called Watson “the most unpleasant human being I had ever met.” But anyone who has got to the top of his disciplinary greasy pole—and Watson won his full professor- ship at Harvard at 30, and his Nobel Prize at 34, for work done when he was only 24— can be reckoned to know a thing or two about how to get on and up in the world of science, and so each chapter of this autobi- ography is identified by the “Manners” ap- propriate for various aspects of scientific life, and each is wrapped up by a series of “Remembered Lessons” on how to behave: “Manners Needed for Important Science,” “Manners Required for Academic Civility,” “Manners Deployed for Academic Zing,” “Manners Maintained When Reluctantly James D. Watson Leaving Harvard.” The big lessons that Watson wants young scientists to learn were already clear in The Double Helix: be charming (when it suits), but be bloody-minded Chairman of the Bored (when it’s necessary); do not su≠er fools, and, indeed, make sure they know that “Lucky Jim” Watson’s unlikely book of academic manners they’re fools; if you are absolutely certain STEVEN SHAPIN that you are absolutely by right, then crush the James D. Watson, opposition. All’s fair in Avoid Boring People: mprobable as it may seem, James D. able. You think (do you not?) that you have love and lab. If you’re Lessons from a Life in Watson—the co-discoverer (with Fran- only to state a reasonable case, and people really good at science, Science (Alfred A. Icis Crick) of the structure of DNA—has must listen to reason and act upon it at and if you stand up for Knopf, $26.95) written a Book of Manners: the most re- once. It is just this conviction that makes what’s right, you’ll in- cent contribution to a genre that stretches you so unpleasant.” evitably make enemies, since, as Jonathan from Baldassare Castiglione’s The Courtier in When his best-selling The Double Helix Swift said, “When a true genius appears the sixteenth century and Francis Os- was published in 1968, some commenta- in the world, you may know him by this borne’s Advice to a Son, or, Directions for Your tors took it as evidence that Watson, for- sign, that the dunces are all in confederacy Better Conduct in the seventeenth century to merly Harvard’s Cabot professor of the against him.” So, in dwelling on his 20 Santiago Ramón y Cajal’s Advice for a Young natural sciences, didn’t have any manners. years at Harvard—from 1956 to 1976— Investigator of 1897 and Peter Medawar’s Ad- Evolutionary biologist Richard Lewontin, Watson variously describes scientific col- vice to a Young Scientist of 1979. But Watson’s professor of biology and Agassiz professor leagues and administrators as “dinosaurs,” most pertinent model must be F. M. Corn- of zoology in the Museum of Comparative “fossilized,” “vapid,” “mediocre,” “dead- ford’s incomparable instruction manual to Zoology emeritus, wrote that Watson’s beats,” some not even “has-beens.” the aspiring academic politician, Microcos- warts-and-more “personal account” of the Watson’s campaign for Harvard back- mographia academica: “I shall take it,” the discovery of the structure of DNA had “de- ing the new molecular biology, and down- Cambridge classicist wrote in 1908, “that based the currency of his own life” and grading its investment in organismic biol- you are in the first flush of ambition, and molecular biologist Robert Sinsheimer, ogy, was the occasion for applying some of just beginning to make yourself disagree- chancellor emeritus at the University of his most deeply felt “lessons”: “multicellu- 24 January - February 2008 Photograph courtesy of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory/ National Human Genome Research Institute MONTAGE lar organisms were best put on the back- burner” until advances were made at a OPEN BOOK molecular and single-cell level. Develop- mental and plant biology were just “tired games,” and the sooner they went away, “Poems Are Not Position Papers” the better: “Never o≠er tenure to practi- tioners of dying disciplines.” Watson lec- tured to undergraduates “Against Embry- Porter University Professor Helen Vendler grew up with her mother’s poetry books, ology,” infuriating many of his colleagues, which “stopped with the Victorians.” It was not until she was 22 that she read Yeats’s “But to sugar-coat science that is going work and “was astonished by it.” She felt too young to write her dissertation on the nowhere ill prepares students for their fu- poems; now, in Our Secret Discipline:Yeats and Lyric Form (Harvard, $35), she feels “it is tures.” Watson was quite serious about not absurd” to do so. this: E.O. Wilson recalls that at one de- partment meeting, Watson announced knew that someone who was 22 like General Sherman, on a wide and that “Anyone who would hire an ecologist I could not write convincingly on the constantly shifting front”). I take as my is out of his mind.” emotions and motives of someone defense for this position Yeats’s re- Watson became a celebrity because of who wrote until he was 73. Perhaps, I marks in a 1927 letter…: “Schopen- the brilliant science he did as a very young thought, once I had lived through the hauer can do no wrong in my eyes—I man, but only about 30 pages of this book stages of life that had, in Yeats,produced no more quarrel with his errors than I track back to those glorious few years the great late poems, I might aim to do with a mountain cattaract [sic]. with Francis Crick in England. Apart from write about them.… Error is but the abyss into which he a brief epilogue on Harvard’s recent insti- precipitates his truth.” Here, as I com- tutional turmoil, the book essentially ment on a poem, I aim to follow the breaks o≠ with his departure from Har- poet’s creative thinking as it motivates vard in 1976, leaving room for a sequel that the evolution of the poem. Nor do I might, for example, deal with Watson’s want to argue with the poems; poems role in the Human Genome Project, which are hypothetical sites of speculation, goes unmentioned here. And there’s no not position papers. They do not exist way that Avoid Boring People can match The on the same plane as actual life; they Double Helix for taut drama. A story about a are not votes, they are not uttered great scientific discovery ends in triumph, from a podium or pulpit, they are not but a story of a life necessarily ends in essays. They are products of rever- some sort of pathos—at most, a contented ie.…Each poem is a new personal ven- life lived in the fading glow of early tri- ture made functional by technical ex- umph, all the more so since Watson seems pertise; the poet’s moral urgency in to believe—against an abundance of writing is as real, William Butler counter-examples—that molecular biolo- Yeats, 1923 needless to say, as his gists’ best years are behind them by age 40. technical skill, but Some of the rest of Boring deals with the moral urgency alone never made a outstanding problems in gene regulation poem. On the other hand, technical ex- that became so clearly framed once the [T]o my eyes, Yeats’s style was the pertise alone does not suffice, either. double-helical model of DNA was em- most important of his qualities, since it Form is the necessary and skilled em- braced, and with the links forged between was what would make the poems last. bodiment of the poet’s moral urgency, molecular biology and cancer research. Yeats himself said, after all, “Books live the poet’s method of self-revelation.… These were no mere mopping-up opera- almost entirely because of their style.” Yeats asserted (in his elegy for the tions, and enormous ingenuity was needed To undertake a book that was taxonom- painter Robert Gregory) that the gaz- to flesh out what Crick called the “Central ically focused on Yeats’s lyric styles was ing heart “doubled its might” by having Dogma” of molecular biology: DNA codes not entirely what I wanted to do…but it recourse to the artist’s “secret disci- for RNA which in turn codes for proteins, was what needed to be done. .… pline” of form. He singled out…“that and the process does not work in the re- I have put myself here in the position stern colour and that delicate line”— verse direction. But most of Boring is either of the writer of the poems, attempting an emotional palette and structural personal—and other reviewers can have to track his hand and mind as he draftsmanship—as the ingredients of their say about the “full-bodied blond writes. I do not, therefore, argue with that “secret discipline.” In poetry, as in bombshells,” “wisps of pale, fragile flesh,” Yeats’s ideological or aesthetic posi- all the arts, “the gazing heart” remains and “petite, well-shaped” socialites, tions (which in any case changed over the center, but it doubles its might by princesses, and Radcli≠e students who time, and were never anything but its own proper means: diction, troop through its pages—or it is about the complex; as my teacher John Kelleher prosody, structural evolution, a sense ever-increasing amounts of time and en- once said, “Yeats is a poet who moved, of perfected shape.
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