Behavior Patterns of Scientists

Abstract

IThe history of science indelibly records 1953 as the year in which the structure of the DNA molecule was discovered. But it is 1968 that will probably emerge as the year of the double helix in the history that treats the behavior of scientists, for James Watson's deeply personal account of that discovery has evidently seized the public imagination. To judge from the popular reviews, the essential message of the book was taken to be: scientists are human, after all. This phrasing, it turns out, does not mean that scientists can be assigned at long last to the species Homo sapiens. Many Americans and some Englishmen were apparently prepared to entertain that serviceable hypothesis even before the appearance of The Double Helix. Evidently, what is meant by the Watson-induced thought that scientists, too, are human is that scientists are all too human. What, then, are the stories Watson tells about the social and intellectual interactions that entered into the discovery, stories eliciting the popular response that scientists are all too human? Above all else, he tells of the race for priority; a close awareness of the champion rival who must be defeated in this contest of minds; a driving insistence on getting needed data from sometimes reluctant, sometimes inadvertent collaborators; a competition for specific discoveries over the years between the Cavendish and Caltech; an allegedly English sense of private domains for scientific investigation which bear nopoaching signs; an express ambition for that ultimate symbol of accomplishment, the Nobel Prize; he tells, too, about alternating periods of intense thought and almost calculated idleness (while the gestation of ideas pursues its course); about false starts and errors of inference; about quickly getting up needed scientific knowledge despite an impressive inventory of initial ignorance; about the complementarity of talents, skills, and character-structure of the symbiotic collaborators; about an unfailing sense for the key problem, and an intuitive and stubbornly maintained imagery

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