Genes, Girls, and Gamow
The Journal of Heredity
0 Muriel Lederman Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University Department of Biology Blacksburg , VA 24061 , USA
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Genes, Girls, and Gamow
This is the second installment of
Watson’s autobiography. Unlike The Double
Helix, which described an intellectual
adventure, Girls, Genes, and Gamow reads
likes Watson’s appointment book for the
period between 1953 and 1968. It adds
adjectives for interest, but also tedious
descriptions of persons who are
peripheral to whatever story Watson is telling.
The scientific focus of this volume—the
‘‘Genes’’ of the title—is presumably the
RNA Tie Club, the informal group that
considered how sequence information in
DNA becomes expressed in protein
(although Watson includes very little about
the Club members’ discussion of the
important problems that tied them
together). The physicist George ‘‘Gamow’’
is behind the beginning of the Club; his
original letters to Watson are reproduced
in the book and serve as charming
demonstrations of Gamow’s wit and
verve. Anyone who really wants to know
about the Tie Club, the solution to the
coding problem, the unraveling of how
information is transferred from the
nucleus to the cytoplasm, and how protein
synthesis takes place should read the
vivid detail in Horace Freeland Judson’s
The Eighth Day of Creation.
The most disturbing element of the
volume is its unremitting inclusion of
‘‘Girls.’’ The reader is subjected to
Watson’s constant whining about not having
a sweetheart while simultaneously being
told more than anyone wants to know
about his failed rendezvous. Even his
decisions about where to do science are
predicated on the availability of girls:
Matt Meselson, for example, is told by
Watson that he should work in Sweden
because the ultracentrifuge was
developed there and because Swedish women
do not have sexual hang-ups. Watson is
interested in a position at Harvard in part
because of the many girls whose faces
caught his eye. He pines for a young girl,
and I mean young—just 17 years old
when he was initially smitten. I do not
use her name, and if I were she, or any of
the other married and unmarried women
who dallied with Watson, I would be
really angry that my name was published.
Watson’s descriptions of his encounters
with these women is affectless and
somehow totally centered about his
own ego. He complains when the love of
his life prefers Kandinsky’s paintings to
depictions of madonnas because he finds
Kandinsky jarring and not conducive to
bringing couples together. Watson
mentions conversations with the feminist
novelist Doris Lessing and the left-wing
journalist I. F. Stone; imagining what
occurred at these encounters boggles
the mind.
Even though this book was published
in 2002, Watson’s sexist attitudes are
antediluvian. He does not understand
even now why Ruth Sager was not happy
to be called Mrs. Seymour Melman. He
writes that the attractive girls invariably
took the invertebrate course at Woods
Hole, rather than the (more difficult?)
physiology course. He verges on
stereotypical homophobia when he says that
a long-haired male’s study of ballet with
the son of Michel Fokine does not imply
‘‘disinterest in pretty girls’’ (p. 94). Oh,
and by the way, Watson’s sister wore
Jacques Fath clothes, and it was Ernst
Freese (not Freeze!) who did the BUdR
mutagenesis work.
Abbie Hoffman wrote Steal this Book.
For Genes, Girls, and Gamow, do not risk
jail time, and do not waste your money. (...truncated)