Friday, 19 October 2007

Persona non grata (2)

You'll be delighted to hear that Dr Watson has not just been banned from public speaking, he's lost his job as well!

My latest blogpost: Persona non grata (2)Tweet this! Posted by Mark Wadsworth at 14:50

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3 comments:

Anonymous said...

What goes round, comes round.

The biggest kicking which history has delivered to Watson is for his shoddy nicking of the work of Rosalind Franklin, who was on the verge of making the discovery of the structure of DNA and was hanging on for a few more photos.

Her work - especially photo 51 - was shown to Watson, apparently without her permission. He then put this together with several other concepts, and he and Crick produced the DNA model.

The action of Watston towards Franklin was then to try to portray her as a functionary, somebody whose work they had every right to appropriate on the grounds - highly debatable - that she wouldn't have been able to interpret her own photos. Watson even seemed to think she had some obligation to look how he thought she should.

"By choice she did not emphasize her feminine qualities. . . . There was never lipstick to contrast with her straight black hair, while at the age of thirty-one her dresses showed all the imagination of English blue-stocking adolescents. So it was quite easy to imagine her the product of an unsatisfied mother who unduly stressed the desirability of professional careers that could save bright girls from marriages to dull men."

To be fair, Watson seems to have always had an acid gob on him, in spite of which Franklin subsequently became his friend. By the time he, Crick and Wilkins won the Nobel Prize in 1962, she was dead, possibly due to irradiating herself via inadequate safety precautions in the labs.

The irony is, that because Crick was so vile about Franklin in 1968, her character stuck out and people began to investigate what she actually did. Later versions of the book contain apologies for earlier pronouncements.

Bit of a habit with him.

19 October 2007 at 15:52
Mark Wadsworth said...

It's a shame that last post was deleted. It went along these lines ...

"That Watson is a shit has been known generally for at least 50 years. Unfortunately, he is a shit of genius..."

Which is all backed up by the relevant chapter in Bill Bryson's "A brief History of Everything"

19 October 2007 at 19:32
The Sage of Muswell Hill said...

MW

I deleted the post because of a technical hitch (I cocked up the a/href= etc tag) and I failed to copy and re-post. Pity, I thought it was a rather pithy contribution so I'm glad you picked up a bit of it.

20 October 2007 at 20:53

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