Detective Story

By Frederic Golden

THE EIGHTH DAY OF CREATION by Horace Freeland Judson

Simon & Schuster; 686 pages; $15.95

To anyone who took high school or college biology before the enlightenment of the 1950s, the subject was closed. Even the magical initials DNA were scarcely known outside the scientific priesthood. But while the public remained ignorant of the intellectual time bomb silently ticking in its midst, a few young renegades created a startlingly new discipline that they called molecular biology.

It audaciously examined the most profound of all genetic questions: How do living things pass on characteristics from one generation to the next? The answer turned out to lie in the tiny, long-mysterious bits of deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) tucked away in the heart of every cell.

By now, molecular biology's leap into prominence has been amply documented. In 1953, at Britain's venerable Cambridge University, two brash young scientists named James Watson and Francis Crick made a discovery comparable to the fissioning of the atom or Darwin's publication of Origin of Species. In a matter of months, after cribbing clues from associates and competitors, Watson, then 25, and Crick, 36, cracked what they grandiosely called "the secret of life": they unraveled the long, spiraling architecture of the DNA molecule, a feat that suggested how heredity truly worked.

No one has told the story better than Watson himself. His bestselling 1968 memoir, The Double Helix, was so witty and candid that Crick regarded it as an invasion of privacy. Why another traverse of the same terrain? Because, as Author Horace Freeland Judson makes clear in his extraordinary lay history of molecular biology, there is far more to DNA than Watson and Crick. Indeed, molecular biology's beginnings involved so many characters and subplots, so many false starts and flashes of insight, that it has all the elements of an epic detective story.

Judson does not slight the Watson-Crick episode. But he also provides a broader landscape, carefully filling in details of the so-called phage group, a small band of mostly ex-physicists who decided to use bacteria-eating viruses as a kind of genetic scalpel; the virtually forgotten work of Rockefeller Institute's Oswald Avery; the painstaking efforts of scientists to explain exactly how DNA and its kin, RNA (for ribonucleic acid), performed their magic; and finally the patient toil of Britain's Max Perutz, who unraveled the structure and precise workings of the blood's oxygen-carrying molecule that, in complexity of design, is to DNA what a skyscraper is to a town house.

A former cultural correspondent for TIME in London, Judson spent nearly a decade immersing himself in molecular biology's opaque literature, learning its special language and nuances and, above all, interviewing its major figures. As he describes his visits with scientists in the lab, listening to their rambling explanations and even lunching with them at their homes, he seems to record every murmur and move, even the labels of the wines on their tables.

Much has been made of molecular biology's great promise: cures for cancer, the correction of hereditary diseases.

Judson wisely avoids such hyperbole. Even a generation after molecular biology's birth, its midwives are usually experimenting with nothing higher on the evolutionary ladder than the intestinal bacterium Escherichia coli. Judson's characters are not primarily interested in great practical payoffs but in a grand intellectual quest: solving puzzles, under standing nature rather than dominating it. The game is science for science's sake.

Though in awe of his heroes, Judson is not blind to their egomanias and foibles. Watson is "markedly bright and never accustomed to hide the fact." Linus Pauling, a fount of chemical wis dom and occasional foolishness, has "un quenchable self-confidence." Biochemist Erwin Chargaff, bypassed by the DNA revolution, is "the man of mordant dissent." But in the main, the author is content to take the role of acolyte, bombarding his gifted tutors with questions, some incisive, others pointedly rhetorical. As Judson plays student to Nobel Laureates Crick and Perutz, so does the reader, who, if patient enough, can gain an understanding and appreciation of the century's most elusive science.

--Frederic Golden

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