today’s very lucky used book find: James Watson’s memoir of the discovery of DNA

this was a dry factual kernel told in a high school science classroom of my childhood. “Watson and Crick discovered the double helix in the 1950s”, stored in a buffer and dumped the minute the unit exam was over.

i had no idea that Watson was a talented writer. he relates the events of 1951-1953 in what i can only describe as a “Tolkien writing his own preface to The Lord of the Rings” style: calm but excited; simple yet eloquent; personal yet cultural; historical yet grounded in the affairs of English daily life.

it is a story about the human drama of scientific discovery, which involves difficult personalities, obsession and mercurialism.

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