Exuberance: The Passion for Life (26 page)

The discovery of the structure of DNA is the defining event of modern biology. It has been described by Sir Peter Medawar as
the greatest achievement of science in the twentieth century, and by the renowned Harvard biologist E. O. Wilson as a scientific accomplishment that “
towered over all that the rest of us had achieved and could ever hope to achieve. It came like a lightning flash, like knowledge from the gods.” Medawar, an immunologist and Nobel laureate, emphasized the elegance of the Watson-Crick solution: “
The great thing about their discovery was its completeness, its air of finality … if the solution had come out piecemeal instead of in
a blaze of understanding: then it would still have been a great episode in biological history but something more in the common run of things; something splendidly well done, but not in the grand romantic manner.” Watson himself described his and Crick’s discovery as an “
adventure characterized both by youthful arrogance and by the belief that the truth, once found, would be simple as well as pretty.” The adventure was a quest, the goal was the Holy Grail of biology, and the knights errant turned out to be ferociously competitive, monomaniacal, and right.

The publication of
The Double Helix
rocked the world of academic biology. Some loved it. The mathematician, scientist, and anthropologist Jacob Bronowski said that Watson’s account “
communicates the spirit of science as no formal account has ever done… [it] expresses the open adventure of science; the sense of the future, the high spirits and the rivalry and the guesses right and wrong, the surge of imagination and the test of fact.” The sociologist Robert Merton, in a
New York Times
review, wrote that he knew of no other book like it in describing scientists at work, that it was a “
wonderfully candid self-portrait of the scientist as a young man in a hurry.” Watson, he said, had portrayed honestly what had always been true in history: scientists are intent not only on discovery, but on being first. Richard Feynman wrote to Watson, “
You are describing how science
is
done. I know, for I have had the same beautiful and frightening experience.”

Alex Comfort, both a scientist and novelist, suggested that Watson might well deserve a second Nobel Prize, for literature. He began his review in the
Manchester Guardian
by stating that there “
has never been anything quite like this tactless and truly remarkable book.” Generally, he pointed out, “one doesn’t write a low-down on the Church while staying in Holy Orders.” Comfort captures the book’s romance and high spirits perfectly: “
The style is elated, and so it should be: there is no experience of human intoxication
to equal the solving of a fundamental problem in Cambridge in early spring, when one is in one’s twenties. This excitement is transmitted to any reader, even if he thinks DNA is a kind of aircraft glue.”

Other reviewers were less kind, not to say vitriolic. Harvard University Press refused to honor its initial commitment to publish the book. Lawsuits were threatened. The editor of
Nature
, the journal that had published the original scientific paper by Watson and Crick, stated that “
no fewer than a dozen distinguished molecular biologists had declined an invitation to review the book.” Of those who did review it, several were outraged by Watson’s depiction of raw scientific competitiveness and his personal arrogance, his caustic appraisal of colleagues (especially Rosalind Franklin), and a seeming abandonment of the grace and ideals of Science. He was accused of character assassination and of portraying a world of intense ambition; his book, it was said, was a “
bleak recitation of bickering and personal ambition.” The science editor of
The Saturday Review
worried about its damaging effects on immature minds.

Whatever truth there was in some of the criticism, most of it was disingenuous. Science has always been intensely competitive, always marked by heated battles over priority, about who got there first. Among many others, the bitter rivalries of Newton and Leibniz, Lavoisier and Priestley, and Edison and Tesla come quickly to mind. Sir Howard Florey, who received the Nobel Prize for his work on penicillin, observed that priority is an essential concept to scientists. “
Like geographical explorers of old,” he said, “the scientist likes to be the first to make a discovery, the first to do something.” Such competitiveness is scarcely unique to science, of course; it is also integral to love, to the arts, sports, law, politics, and business. Fierce competition, in short, is part and parcel of any field of stake or moment.

Competition is as ancient as the hunt; the same fire that rouses
the thrill of pursuit is kept kindled by the joy of victory. There is pleasure in the run, of course, but the high glory is in being first across the line. The biologist Richard Lewontin put it succinctly: “
What every scientist knows, but few will admit, is that the requirement for great success is great ambition. Moreover, the ambition is for personal triumph over other men, not merely over nature. Science is a form of competitive and aggressive activity, a contest of man against man that provides knowledge as a side product.” The exhilaration of winning is lashed to the rush of discovery.

Watson’s portrayal of his fellow scientists is on occasion harsh, but he is also brutally honest about his own behavior. As Medawar writes, “
He betrays in himself faults graver than those he professes to discern in others.” A lack of tact may betray a friendship, but too much tact may betray the truth. In fact, tact has never been Watson’s long suit, but then he has never claimed otherwise. (The editor of
Nature
put reviewers’ offended sensibilities and claims of injudicious writing in perspective: “
If, of course, his picture is seriously awry, then other people are free to protest and even have a duty to do so. It is not enough simply to resolve never again to invite Professor Watson to tea and biscuits.”) Matt Ridley has put it well: “
What a much duller—and safer—history DNA would have had without Watson stirring things up.”

For those of us who read
The Double Helix
when we were young, however, whatever offense Watson may have caused his fellow scientists was of little consequence; what mattered was the idea that the most famous biologist in the world was saying that science was fun; that science was about asking important questions and taking seriously one’s own intellectual life. The book was a classic adventure tale brilliantly told: a zigzag quest, wrong turns, setbacks, new leads, and hot pursuit—part Robert Louis Stevenson, part James Barrie. There was treasure to be found, enemies to fight,
exciting terrain to cover, mishaps aplenty, and a shot at glory. It was irresistible.

Impatience in the pursuit of something great, Watson made abundantly clear, was more virtue than vice. Instead of society’s usual, more disparaging take on this particular aspect of temperament, Watson was actually saying that speed and passion were essential to the chase. Instead of entreaties to slow down, be patient, be circumspect, someone was acknowledging that impatience is the obverse of exuberance and that exuberance was a good, even necessary thing. “
Damn the men of measured merriment!” Martin Arrowsmith had exclaimed. “DAMN their careful smiles!” The ghost of Sinclair Lewis’s driven protagonist had found its niche in
The Double Helix
. Intemperance, when coupled with the discipline of scientific thought, was given a far more kindly reading than it usually gets. Francis Crick wrote later that Watson “
just wanted the answer, and whether he got it by sound methods or flashy ones did not bother him a bit. All he wanted was to get it
as quickly as possible.… In
some ways I can see that we acted insufferably … but it was not all due to competitiveness. It was because we passionately wanted to know the details of the structure.”

Watson and Crick knew that what they were looking for was as important as it gets, and they did not, or could not, rein themselves in. Maurice Wilkins, their colleague and competitor at King’s College, London, was, on the other hand, decidedly lower-key than his Cambridge compatriots. “
Maurice continually frustrated Francis by never seeming enthusiastic enough about DNA,” wrote Watson. “Francis felt he could never get the message over to Maurice that you did not move cautiously when you were holding dynamite like DNA.”

Science, as depicted by Watson, was fast and exciting. It was not a calling for the indifferent, the slow, or the faint of heart. Science needed reason and discipline, of course, but it also required passion;
it wanted commitment; it was cutthroat, it was human. “
Our characters were imperfect,” Watson said not long ago, “but that’s life.”

When I first thought about writing about exuberance, thirty years after having read
The Double Helix
as an undergraduate, I hoped to capture some of its importance by interviewing several scientists, most of whom I knew personally to be highly exuberant; a few others I knew only through their work. My interest was not in demonstrating that exuberance is essential to good science—clearly it is not; many outstanding scientists are introverted and not demonstrably enthusiastic, and for many others patience and dispassion are essential to the excellence of their work—rather, I hoped to show that for many scientists exuberance plays a critical role in how they think about and actually do their work.

Most of the scientists I interviewed were biologists. In addition to James Watson, I interviewed Carleton Gajdusek, who was awarded the Nobel Prize for his work on unconventional “slow viruses”; Robert Gallo, discoverer of the first human retrovirus, codiscoverer of the AIDS virus, and the only scientist to win the Lasker Award, which is often described as the American Nobel Prize, for both basic and clinical research; Samuel Barondes, a pioneer in the study of a class of proteins called galectins and a leading researcher into the genetic causes of mental illness; Joyce Poole, the scientific director of the Amboseli Elephant Research Project in Kenya; Katy Payne, an acoustic biologist who discovered new ways of understanding how elephants communicate; and Hope Ryden, who studies and writes about wildlife, including beavers, mustangs, and bobcats. I also interviewed two astrophysicists, Robert Farquhar and Andrew Cheng, from the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory.

James Watson was an obvious scientist to interview about exuberance.
When I asked him to rate both himself and Francis Crick on a hypothetical ten-point scale of exuberance, he said emphatically, “Ten!” then quickly added, “And then some!” He described exuberance, in his staccato, stream-of-consciousness way, as “an obsessive fascination, like religious fanaticism. You have to talk about it. Exuberance flows, it is never slimy. It is close to delirium. There is no feedback, no restraint, no bringing you back.”

The greatest thing, Watson said, is the exuberance of sharing beauty or discovery with someone else: “
It is necessary to share it. You run around and tell everyone. Shy people are seldom exuberant. It is a state of mind which can only be relieved by communicating the idea. If you are delirious, you have to share it. You have to demonstrate it to other people.” When asked if he thought there could be such a thing as solitary exuberance, he said, “Perhaps. I don’t know. You have to demonstrate it to other people.” The major disadvantage of exuberance, from his perspective, was that “bad people can be exuberant,” which makes them more dangerous than they would otherwise be, because they are more persuasive and energetic. In its most extreme form, he says, exuberance is “associated with madness.” It can also, he added, “prove too much for your friends to put up with.”

When he and Crick discovered the structure of DNA, Watson recalls, both were “bubbling over with exuberance. We
had
to share our ideas, we
had
to talk about it. It was a happy state, virtually delirious.” (A scientist who was at the Cavendish in the weeks following Watson and Crick’s discovery used similar language to describe their mental state: “
Both young men are somewhat mad hatters who bubble over about their new structure,” Gerard Pomerat wrote in his diary at the time. “The two chaps,” he added, were “certainly not lacking … in either enthusiasm or ability.”) Watson relates in
The Double Helix
that Crick constantly
“would
pop up from his chair, worriedly look at the cardboard models, fiddle with other combinations, and then, the period of momentary uncertainty over, look satisfied and tell me how important our work was. I enjoyed Francis’s words, even though they lacked the casual sense of understatement known to be the correct way to behave in Cambridge.” The next morning, he said, “I felt marvelously alive when I awoke.” Crick, meanwhile, had “
winged into the Eagle [a Cambridge pub] to tell everyone within hearing distance that we had found the secret of life.”

Watson places positive traits such as curiosity and exuberance (which he, like nearly everyone else I interviewed, believes to be
more innate than learned) within an evolutionary context. When asked by the novelist Melvyn Bragg why scientists do science, he responded: “
I just like to know why things happen and I think that is probably something we have inherited. Curiosity about things, why things happen, can prepare you for how you live in the world. It has great survival value, this sort of curiosity and it is a question of how our curiosity is directed. Many people are very curious about things, are obsessed about things, which you could say have no consequence.” (A mind focused on the most critical scientific issues—DNA, cancer, sequencing the human genome, and neuroscience—has marked Watson’s scientific career. He has lived James Merrill’s injunction that “
it’s not the precious but the semiprecious one has to resist.”)

In his Liberty Medal address in Philadelphia on the first Independence Day of the new millennium, Watson spoke about the survival value of the
pursuit
of happiness, and the importance of having constraints upon that happiness: “
Our various brains have been programmed by our genes to initiate actions that keep us alive. Most individuals are only fleetingly happy, say, after we have solved a problem, either intellectual or personal, that then lets our brain rest for a bit. Equally important, happy moods also reward
higher animals after they make behavioral decisions that increase their survivability.” But, he went on to say, “these moments of pleasure best be short-lived. Too much contentment necessarily leads to indolence … it is discontent with the present that leads clever minds to extend the frontiers of human imagination.” Happiness, joy, and exuberance exist because they lure us onward and give us respite from our pursuits, but too much pleasure slackens the desire to explore, compete, and make a difference. “Every successful society,” Watson emphasized, “must possess citizens gnawing at its innards, and threatening conventional wisdom.” He concluded his remarks, “As long as we see happiness ahead, the worries and faults of today are bearable. So in the perfect world we want some day to exist, humans will be born free and die almost happy.”