It Wasn't Just Watson, Crick, Wilkins and Franklin

If you are thinking about buying this book, you already know the heroic tale of Watson, Crick and Wilkins, with the pilfered crystalography from Rosalind Franklin. But it is just that -- a tale, with a few mythic heroes. Biology does not appear to be like physics in the early 20th century, where brilliant individuals came to astonishing insights. Instead, biology advances through years of toil by countless scientists, all grinding away at small parts of very big problems.

The structure of DNA was such a problem. Before 1950, many of the main points were known, or at least had been tentatively suggested: that DNA is the molecule that carries the inheritance principle; the helical structure; the four bases, the possibility that its specificity (and hence the ability to carry genetic information) might reside in the order of the base pairs; that sequences of base pairs might correspond to amino acids; and the possibility of transferring genes from one organism to another would alter the second organism (at least in certain bacteria).

Matthew Cobb tells the story of all these discoveries in this brilliant book. Of course, he also tells the story of the double helix, and the suggestion that it explains how DNA could be replicated in mitosis and meiosis. The insights of Watson, Crick, Wilkins and Franklin were indeed brilliant and deserve to be celebrated, but in the history Cobb tells they are members of a large and brilliant group, not the sole "discoverers" of the DNA structure. Nor could they even be said to be the culminating discoverers, because many more insights were proposed by many more researchers after 1953, the year of their major papers.

I am a big Matthew Cobb fan. He has also written a remarkable history of neuroscience, called The Idea of the Brain. Readers of that book will recognize large areas about the information science dealt with also in this book. I am not sure that parts of the discussion of information theory are strictly relevant. Obviously, the genetic code is information, and the mechanisms for determining gene expression can be understood as examples of positive and negative feedback loops. But pure information is, well, information. It is not material. By contrast, the information in the gene is entirely material. DNA is a physical template for mRNA, and mRNA is a physical template for amino acid sequences. Thus, the theory of pure information is really beside the point. That said, the discussion of information theory, and some of its personalities, is well worth it.

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