Discover Dialogue: Geneticist James Watson - The latest in science and technology news, blogs and articles
James Watson's solution: 'Just let all the genetic decisions be made by women'
By David Ewing Duncan|Tuesday, July 01, 2003
Fifty years ago, two unknown molecular biologists at the CavendishLaboratory at Cambridge University had one of the great eureka momentsin the history of science: They discovered that DNA is organized in theshape of a double helix—two intertwining strands of nucleotides on asuperstructure of sugar. Only 25 years old then, James Watson was astringy, thin biologist with wavy hair and a desire to be famous. Bornin 1928, he graduated from the University of Chicago at age 19 and gothis Ph.D. at Indiana University at 22. In 1962 he, Francis Crick, andMaurice Wilkins won the Nobel Prize for their discovery. In theintervening years, Watson has remained a key figure in genetics,serving as the president of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory on LongIsland and as the original director of the Human Genome Project. Inthis spirited interview with author David Ewing Duncan, he reinforceshis position as a powerful, independent force in biology.
What are you most proud of?
W: My textbook The Molecular Biology of the Gene and my book The Double Helix.
Not the actual discovery of the double helix?
W:No, because the double helix was going to be found in the next year ortwo. It was just waiting to be found, and I was the one who finallyfound it because I was the most obsessed about it.
How do you account for what you've accomplished?
W:Ambition. You want to get things done. And you want your university oryour school to be good; you want to do important things. And you seethat society will be helped, and so to what extent you say: I'm justtrying to push myself. . . . Francis Crick and I both wanted to do bigthings. If you succeed with your first dream, it helps. You know,people trust you, possibly, for the second one. They give you a chanceto play out your second one.
Why did you choose to write a book focusing more on the people involved rather than the science of the double helix?
W:I wanted to see if I could write a good book. It was ahead of its time,you could say, in terms of style. I wasn't thinking of myself as ascientist, you know. My heroes were never scientists. They were GrahamGreene and Christopher Isherwood, you know, good writers.
Did it bother you that some people found your descriptions of them to be somewhat critical?
W: No one said my descriptions were wrong; they just said I shouldn't have had them. Francis Crick and I talked that way.
RosalindFranklin's high-resolution X-ray diffraction images of DNA became acrucial discovery in Watson and Crick's search for the
structure of thedouble helix. She died of
cancer in 1958 at age 37.
Photograph: SPL/Photo Researchers.
What about Rosalind Franklin? Do you think she got the credit she deserved?
W:She died too soon. We didn't get much credit for those first fiveyears. You know, we knew we'd done something big, but theMeselson-Stahl experiment hadn't been done, which confirmed the doublehelix in 1958. She died in 1958. . . . It was sad when she got ovariancancer. But you know, if she'd just talked to Francis, he would havetold her what we were thinking. And she would have solved thestructural problem. If she had shared her evidence, he would have toldher what it meant. She would have gone back and found the double helix.But she didn't want to speak to us. We were the enemy.
It must have been hard for a woman in the boys'-club atmosphere at Cambridge at the time.
W: I thought she was rather dowdy. I didn't dislike her or anything like that. We never got a chance to know each other.
Should she have shared in the Nobel?
W:Some people have said that we should have shared the glory with her. .. . It's true that when I saw her photograph [of DNA], that galvanizedme into action. But then people think it was all the details of thephotograph that gave me the answer. It wasn't that; it's toocomplicated to go into. But she never held it against Francis when shewas dying. She went to stay in his house. But they never talked aboutit. Francis says they were concerned with the future, not the past.
I'vebeen told by some geneticists that humans are essentially organicmachines and that one day we will understand how we work. If so, whathappens to that unexplainable mystery of what makes us human, where wedraw our passion, our poetry—our soul, if you will?
W: Theluckiest thing that ever happened to me was that my father didn'tbelieve in God, and so he had no hang-ups about souls. I see ourselvesas products of evolution, which itself is a great mystery.
What about the impact of genetics on emotions?
W:Take love. At the end of it, love doesn't come from God, so it's notthe greatest gift of God but the greatest gift of our genes. You seeevidence of maternal care in birds, and they feel seemingly prettystrong about it. So it's an emotion that has an enormous selectiveadvantage. You've probably met someone who you think is just notcapable of love. I suspect that they lack a gene that is necessary forthe emotion.
Does the lack of a love gene mean these people will lose out in evolution?
W:No, as long as you've got a good brain, you can marry for money. Thereare other strategies, so I'm sure there are a lot of loveless women inAmerica.
What about other emotions—say, anger?
W:In several studies researchers have found a gene associated withviolence. They found the gene can exist in two forms: the gene whereyou express a lot of the enzyme and the one where you express a little.Then they correlated that with what happened to children who wereabused. If a child was abused and didn't have much of that enzyme, theyhad a much higher probability of getting into trouble with the law. Ifyou weren't abused, the chance of your getting into trouble with thelaw was much, much slimmer. So most people, if they have a lot of theenzyme, the anger dissipates fast. If you come from a good family, thenwhen you get angry, you don't hit someone in the face. I want to testmyself because I bet I have the root form of the gene, but I keep it inthe background.
Do you get angry?
W: Very fast.
Is it over with fast?
W: Yes.
What is the purpose of this anger gene?
W:It is extremely interesting to find out why some people have onepersonality and others are really different, because if there's onething that doesn't seem to change during people's lives, it's theirpersonality. If someone is phlegmatic, it's with them all their life.You can't change it.
Have you ever been tested for DNA markers for disease?
W:I haven't been. I had my mitochondrial DNA completely sequenced. I havea very common mitochondrion—the most common one. My Irish grandmotherdied in 1992 when she was in a nursing home; she was enraged for ayear, and my mother couldn't handle it. So I suspect it wasAlzheimer's. No one ever used the word, but she had become impossibleto handle.
How do you feel about being tested for the Alzheimer's gene?
W: I don't want to know unless I can do something about it, so I'm acting as if I have the bad news.
Explain your theory of happiness.
W:My idea is we're dominated by our emotions. And emotions, you know,have chemical circuits. And these influence our genes, and this is notsurprising—you might need different sorts of people in a stablesociety. Some people get angry, some people don't. The gene forendorphin makes up part of a protein called POMC. So this protein isbroken down by proteases. On the one end are endorphins, but on theother end is melanocortin and what used to be called MSH. Now MSH ismade when you're in the sun. So when you make MSH, you're also makingendorphins. So my theory is that that's why the sun makes you happy.But if you're not in the sun, you're unhappy. So my theory of happinessis that there are emotions that have a selective advantage; they makeyou do things that are good for you.
What about manipulatingthings like happiness or, say, intelligence or memory—if this becomespossible? What if you were able to genetically enhance these things?
W:I think that would be great, because I think so many people hardly havethe intelligence that lets them survive in our civilization. Maybe oneof the reasons for this growing inequality of income may in some sensebe a reflection of some people being more strong and healthy thanothers. Some people, no matter how much schooling you give them, willnever really be up to what is now considered a necessary degree ofeffective intelligence. We're sitting at the top of the pyramid of anawful lot of things that happen without us knowing it, that allow us tobe sitting here. We never ask what it's like to be at the bottom. Thereseems to be a total lack of compassion for people at the bottom.
Crickand Watson met at the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge, England, in1951, when Watson was 23 and Crick was 35.
Two years later theyannounced their groundbreaking
model of the DNA molecule.
Photograph: James D. Watson
Collection/Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Archives.
Inthe 1990s we had the "digital divide" between the technology haves andthe have-nots. What will happen when the wealthy have access to geneticenhancements but not the poor?
W: The function of geneticsshould be somehow to try to reverse bad truths. I think we need todevelop a political philosophy about this, to establish rules. One isthat some people fail for reasons out of their control. . . . Whatfunction of you is really caused by having a bad throw of the geneticdice?
Do you worry that through genetic engineering we maycreate a new subspecies of human who is stronger, smarter, andhealthier, and that this new species will end up surviving while thecurrent Homo sapiens dies out? Something like the situation with the Neanderthals and our ancestors, the Cro-Magnons?
W:No, I don't think so. It depends on how we approach it. I think somepeople may have to be helped. Whether it's getting the genes for mentalillness out of their family, however you do it. You could add a genethat would make you resistant to HIV. Wouldn't that be a rather nicething? But I'm not in favor of a "sterilizing the lower classes" kindof argument.
Let me jump to the next step of that: You areJim Watson. You're put in charge of how we as a society are going toreact to issues raised by genetics—stem cells, bioengineering, and thelike. What would you do?
W: Well, my sensibility is verylibertarian. Just let all genetic decisions be made by individualwomen. That is, never ask what's good for the country; ask what's goodfor the family. I don't know what's good for the country, but you canoften say what's good or bad for the family. That is, mental disease isno good for any family. And so if there's a way of trying to fightthat, I'd let a woman have the choice to do it or not do it. Not givein and have the state tell you to have a certain sort of child. I wouldbe very frightened by the state telling you one way or the other.
What about some of the issues like stem cell cloning?
W:I think no president could withhold any treatment that works. Since wedon't know whether stem cells will cure Parkinson's, you can, you know,wait and see what happens. But I don't have a problem with George Bush.He wants to be re-elected, and he may actually believe in God.
Do you have a fear that the momentum in research may shift to Europe?
W:No. The religious right is still only 20 percent of the country. Andeven there, if it was a question of whether they would have a healthygrandchild, they might choose a healthy grandchild.
Biotechclaims to be about to deliver dozens of new drugs and therapies foreverything from heart disease to cancer. How can we pay for this with ahealth care system already straining to pay for what we've got now?
W: We've got to find a fairly cheap way to cure cancer.
DavidKessler, the former commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration,is calling for a big government-funded research project to help fill inthe gaps in genetic pathways in people, which are turning out to be farmore complex than expected for illnesses such as heart disease andwhich may be beyond the ability of private companies and smaller labsto figure out and pay for. Do you think this is necessary?
W:We should have gene expression and big projects organized by theNational Institutes of Health, and they're not doing anything. We gotthe Human Genome Project done because we didn't work through apre-existing institute but set an institute up to do big projects.
Looking around your office here, I notice that you have a copy of Gattaca on your desk.
W: Awfully good movie. It was pretty clever.
What do you think of the world that was depicted there? Is that something we'll see, do you think, or a version of it?
W: No. See, the reality is that we are genetically very unequal now.
So a version of Gattaca already exists today.
W: A version is already here.
All men are created equal, but . . .
W: Yeah. But you know, when he finally has a swimming race, he beats the brother.
In1993, Watson and Crick re-create a famous photograph taken 40 yearsearlier with their model of the DNA molecule. The two
researchersbelieved that knowing the structure
of DNA would lead to anunderstanding of how genes are
transmitted to succeeding generations.
Photograph: James D. Watson Collection/Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Archives.
Whatelse is here in your office? [Watson points to a small drawing and saysthat it is a study done by Salvador Dalí for his famous painting Homage à Crick et Watson,finished in 1963.] So take me back to the early 1960s, when you won theNobel. You were 34, and right afterward, you have Salvador Dalípainting an homage to you. How did that feel?
W: At that time Ithought he was a fascist creep, but we all knew he wasn't saying wewere important; he was saying DNA was important. I think both Crick andI realized we were famous because the double helix was the mostimportant molecule of life, and therefore we got our names associatedwith it. So you know, people are taken seriously for what we did afterthat, not for our discovery.
Nature offers a free archive of five seminal 1953 papers describing the structure of DNA: www.nature.com/nature/dna50/archive.html.
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