James Proctor’s Reviews > The Double Helix > Status Update

Ideas put forward with conviction were likely to be products of wild crystallographers who delighted in being in a field where their ideas could not be easily disproved.

Maurice (Wilkins) was about, looking somewhat sour. He had stopped over on his way to Brazil, where he was to lecture for a month on biophysics. His presence surprised me, since it was against his character to seek the trauma of watching two thousand bread-and-butter biochemists pile in and out of badly lighted baroque lecture halls.

In the evenings there was no way to avoid intellectual games, which gave the greatest advantage to a large vocabulary. Every time my limpid contribution was read, I wanted to sink behind my chair rather than face the condescending stares of the Mitchison women. ...I made a point of sitting near the evening's box of chocolates, hoping no one would notice that I never passed it.

An open outcry would reveal that our professor was completely in the dark about what the initials DNA stood for. There was no reason to believe that he gave it one hundredth the importance of the structure of metals, for which he took great delight in making soap-bubble models. Nothing then gave Sir Lawrence (Bragg) more pleasure than showing his ingenious motion-picture film of how bubbles bump into each other.

Much of the talk about the three-dimensional structure of proteins and nucleic acids was hot air. Though this work had been going on for over fifteen years, most if not all of the facts were soft. Ideas put forth with conviction were likely to be the products of wild crystallographers who delighted in being in a field where their ideas could not be easily disproved.