The Double Helix; Being a Personal Account of the Discovery of the Structure of DNA
New York, N.Y. Atheneum, 1968. Book Club Edition. Hardcover. xvi, 226, [12] pages. Embossed stamp on fep. Ink notation on second fep. DJ has wear, tears, soiling and chips. Foreword by Sir Lawrence Bragg, and Preface, as well as 20 black and white photographs, and 11 black and white diagrams. Portions of this book were first published in The Atlantic Monthly. In 1962, the Nobel Prize for Medicine and Physiology was awarded to Francis H. C. Crick, James D. Watson, and Maurice H. F. Wilkins, the three men who almost a decade earlier had worked together, merging data from chemistry, physics, and biology, to solve the structure of DNA--Crick and Watson on the building of a hypothetical model that would conform in all its parts to what Wilkins' X-ray pictures had already shown of the molecule. The interplay of ideas, temperaments, and circumstances was an especially fortuitous one, since the result that something that, in Watson's words, was too pretty not to be true: the double helix. Watson shows us how this particular piece of science was worked out, but along the way he manages to tell a great deal more, something of the general creative process itself. James Dewey Watson KBE (born April 6, 1928) is an American molecular biologist, geneticist and zoologist. In 1953, he co-authored with Francis Crick the academic paper proposing the double helix structure of the DNA molecule. Watson, Crick and Maurice Wilkins were awarded the 1962 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine "for their discoveries concerning the molecular structure of nucleic acids and its significance for information transfer in living material" The Double Helix: A Personal Account of the Discovery of the Structure of DNA is an autobiographical account of the discovery of the double helix structure of DNA written by James D. Watson and published in 1968. It has earned both critical and public praise, along with continuing controversy about credit for the Nobel award and attitudes towards female scientists at the time of the discovery. Watson is a U.S. molecular biologist, geneticist and zoologist, best known as one of the co-discoverers of the structure of DNA in 1953 with Francis Crick. In 1998, the Modern Library placed The Double Helix at number 7 on its list of the 100 best nonfiction books of the 20th century. In 2012, The Double Helix was named as one of the 88 "Books That Shaped America" by the Library of Congress. Though an important book about an immensely important subject, it was and remains a controversial account. Though it was originally slated to be published by Harvard University Press, Watson's home university, Harvard dropped the arrangement after protestations from Francis Crick and Maurice Wilkins, co-discoverers of the structure of DNA, and it was published instead by Atheneum in the United States and Weidenfeld & Nicolson in the UK. The intimate first-person memoir about scientific discovery was unusual for its time. The book has been hailed for its highly personal view of scientific work, though has been criticized as caring only about the glory of priority and the author is claimed to be willing to appropriate data from others surreptitiously in order to obtain it. It has also been criticized as being disagreeably sexist towards Rosalind Franklin, another participant in the discovery, who was deceased by the time Watson's book was written. The events described in the book were dramatized in a BBC television program Life Story (known as The Race for the Double Helix in the U.S.). Condition: Good / Fair.
Keywords: Francis Crick, Maurice H. F. Wilkins, Nobel Prize winners, DNA, Genome, Genetics, Scientific Discovery, Harvard, Lawrence Bragg
[Book #81847]
Price: $75.00