She claims that Watson's book did not give a balanced description of Rosalind Franklin and the nature of her interactions with Maurice Wilkins at King's College, London. In the book Rosalind Franklin and DNA, author Anne Sayre is very critical of Watson's account. The Norton edition concludes with the 1953 papers on DNA structure as published in Nature. Also included are retrospectives from a 1974 edition of Nature written by Francis Crick and Linus Pauling, and an analysis of Franklin's work by her student Aaron Klug. Erwin Chargaff declined permission to reprint his unsympathetic review from the March 29, 1968, issue of Science, but letters in response from Max Perutz, Maurice Wilkins, and Watson are printed. It presents a selection of both positive and negative reviews of the book, by such figures as Philip Morrison, Richard Lewontin, Alex Comfort, Jacob Bronowski, and more in-depth analyses by Peter Medawar, Robert K. The book leaned heavily on personalities, and some, like Rosalind Franklin, were treated cartoonishly.Ī 1980 Norton Critical Edition of The Double Helix edited by Gunther Stent, analyzed the events surrounding its initial publication.

The events described in the book were dramatized in a BBC television program Life Story (known as The Race for the Double Helix in the U.S.). It has also been criticized as being disagreeably sexist towards Rosalind Franklin, another participant in the discovery, who was deceased by the time Watson's book was written. The book has been hailed for its highly personal view of scientific work, though has been criticised as caring only about the glory of priority and the author is claimed to be willing to appropriate data from others surreptitiously in order to obtain it. The intimate first-person memoir about scientific discovery was unusual for its time. Though it was originally slated to be published by Harvard University Press, Watson's home university, Harvard dropped the arrangement after protestations from Francis Crick and Maurice Wilkins, co-discoverers of the structure of DNA, and it was published instead by Atheneum in the United States and Weidenfeld & Nicolson in the UK. Though an important book about an immensely important subject, it was and remains a controversial account. In 2012, The Double Helix was named as one of the 88 'Books That Shaped America' by the Library of Congress. In 1998, the Modern Library placed The Double Helix at number 7 on its list of the 100 best nonfiction books of the 20th century. molecular biologist, geneticist and zoologist, best known as one of the co-discoverers of the structure of DNA in 1953 with Francis Crick.

Double helix dna