James Watson, Red Aries #27

The dustjacket of The Double Helix is red because blood is the metaphor of hereditary transmission – bloodlines, blood relations, blood will tell. The Aries author told us (in his  third volume of memoirs, Avoid Boring People) that he was delighted by the jacket color. The 1953 book shocked with its demonstration that science is cutthroat and personal, and that scientists are primarily motivated to high achievement by the blind desire to get laid. Watson’s second memoir is called Genes, Girls and Gamow, reiterating the strain of crude sexual reductionism that infects the ‘selfish gene’ theorizing of the belligerent Aries Richard Dawkins as well. This Don Juanism, an inability to get beyond the domination of pubescent excitement, is Aries extroversion par excellence. In all three of his memoirs Watson comes across a puerile oogler.

On the cover of Avoid Boring People Watson put a picture of himself hammering his chair in childish glee.

Watson is a good read, with a brisk Aries writing style. (“Use snappy sentences to open your chapters,” he advises.) Obviously he enjoys ruffling feathers, but it comes as a shock to read sociobiologist E. O. Wilson say he was “the most unpleasant human being I had ever met.” After all, Wilson,  author of Consilience,  is a master at smoothing out differences. Watson notes with pleasure that Linus Pauling called The Double Helix “a disgraceful example of malevolence and egocentricity’. At the beginning of his career he “deeply offended several old-timers by giving lectures in unlaced tennis shoes and wearing my floppy hat at night as well as during the day.”  At the end (recently) he scandalized with reactionary remarks about race, intelligence,  sexuality,  ecology,  obesity,  and so forth,  as if compelled to hit the hot button.

Watson is not so much a great scientist as the most aggressive competitor in a race to complete a difficult puzzle. The word double (in The Double Helix) invokes the Gemini, so the astrologer is pleased to remark that Watson’s partner in the discovery of the double structure of the dna molecule, Francis Crick, was born under that collaborative sign.

Watson’s three volumes of memoirs have importantly contributed to an awareness of the subjectivity of science, a field whose emphasis on objectivity could only be pierced by an exhibitionistic Aries.