Genes, Girls, and Gamow

Journal of Heredity, Nov 2002

Lederman, Muriel

A PDF file should load here. If you do not see its contents the file may be temporarily unavailable at the journal website or you do not have a PDF plug-in installed and enabled in your browser.

Alternatively, you can download the file locally and open with any standalone PDF reader:

https://academic.oup.com/jhered/article-pdf/93/6/464/6454454/464.pdf

Genes, Girls, and Gamow

The Journal of Heredity 0 Muriel Lederman Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University Department of Biology Blacksburg , VA 24061 , USA - 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)


This is a preview of a remote PDF: https://academic.oup.com/jhered/article-pdf/93/6/464/6454454/464.pdf

Lederman, Muriel. Genes, Girls, and Gamow, Journal of Heredity, 2002, pp. 464-465, Volume 93, Issue 6, DOI: 10.1093/jhered/93.6.464