The Double Helix
Historic figures, film synopsis, and discussion questions 1
Historic figures, Cambridge University
James Watson (1928– ). Geneticist, codiscoverer of the double helix, Nobel Prize in Physiology or
Medicine 1962, headed Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory on Long Island, NY; headed Human Genome
Project 1988–92.
Francis Crick (1916–2004). Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 1962; left genetics and worked at
Salk Institute in San Diego in brain development and neurobiology of consciousness until his death in
2004.
Max Perutz (1914–2002). Chemist at Cambridge University, Nobel Prize in Chemistry 1962, for X-ray
study of hemoglobin structure.
Sir John Kendrew (1917–1997). Collaborated with Perutz in X-ray study of hemoglobin structure,
shared 1962 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.
Sir Lawrence Bragg (1890–1971). Physicist. Head of the Cavendish Laboratory. Pioneered use of X
rays to study crystal structure, Nobel Prize in Physics, 1952, at age 25; youngest person ever to
receive a Nobel.
Historic figures, King’s College
Maurice Wilkins (1916–2004). Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 1962, remained at King’s
College as deputy director of Medical Research Council Unit.
Rosalind Franklin (1920–1958). After leaving King’s College, went to Birbeck College of the
University of London system, worked on virus structure, died of uterine cancer in 1958.
Raymond Gosling (1926– ). Franklin’s technician. A doctoral student at King’s College and
collaborator with Wilkins before Franklin arrived. Pioneered the use of X-ray diffraction studies at
King’s. Received his doctoral degree a year after discovery of double helix, became professor at
University of London.
John T. Randall (1905–1984). Physicist, director of biophysics laboratory at King’s College,
Franklin’s and Wilkins’s supervisor.
Historic figures, other
Vittorio Luzzati (?– ). Colleague and close friend of Franklin’s in Paris, where they worked together
in a laboratory study carbon fiber structure by X ray diffraction.
Linus Pauling (1901–1994). Chemist, California Institute of Technology; discoverer of the alpha helix
of protein structure; received Nobel Prize in Chemistry, 1954, for studies by X-ray diffraction and
other means on the nature of chemical bonds and molecular geometry, and the Nobel Peace Prize,
1962, for campaigns against nuclear weapons testing and proliferation. Became interested in DNA but
failed to beat Watson and Crick to the answer.
Erwin Chargaff (1905–2002). Biochemist, Columbia University, NY; discovered the A–T and G–C
pairing of DNA before the double helix structure was known.
1
Prepared by Ken Saladin, Georgia College & State University, 2005
Film Synopsis
Opening
James Watson, 23, is already thinking of fame, the Nobel Prize, and DNA. He would like to work in
Maurice Wilkins’s lab, and manipulates his sister Elizabeth to get in good with him.
1. “One of the Believers”
Watson attends a 1951 lecture in Naples by Wilkins, who has already been working on X ray diffraction
of DNA but with limited success. Wilkins already believes DNA is crystalline. Watson believes “before
there is any evidence” that DNA holds the secret of genetics. He tries unsuccessfully to get an invitation
to work with Wilkins at King’s College.
2. “La Religieuse”
Rosalind Franklin is in Paris. She has just been invited to work at King’s College but is not looking
forward to leaving her friends and cheerful life in Paris to move to London. Her cafe friends poke fun at
the English. She accepts the necessity of self-renunciation for the sake of science. She and her
friend/colleague Vittorio think of themselves as the monks and nuns of science. She arrives in London
on a gray, dreary, rainy day that does not portend very happy days ahead. She meets with lab director
J.T. Randall, who says she and Wilkins can work out who works on what when he returns from his
travels.
3. “The Bright Hope”
Watson has secured a postdoctoral research fellowship at Cambridge University. He meets Cavendish
Laboratory director Sir Lawrence Bragg, who was to receive a Nobel just a year after their meeting.
Max Perutz (another future Nobel recipient) takes him to meet doctoral student Francis Crick, 35, with
whom he is to share an office. He introduces Watson as “the boy wonder” and “the bright hope.” Crick
(like Perutz) is working on hemoglobin structure but is dissatisfied that it’s not a big and exciting
enough problem. Crick and Watson quickly discover that they both think DNA is the key to heredity,
and share a common vision from that moment on. In their pub talk, Watson quickly decides “We’re
going after DNA.” Crick: “Why not?” Meanwhile Wilkins has returned to King’s and meets Franklin.
She is very aloof. He says, “Let me know when you get going” and she replies, “Why?” sending a
signal that she feels she does not need him. In the smoke-filled, men-only common room, the good old
boys sit around trying to figure Franklin out not as a scientist but as a woman. Wilkins is taken aback
by Franklin’s perception that she is in charge of her own work, not him.
4. “Gossip”
Franklin is cold toward the English from the start. Wilkins has a rather dejected personality; he had
worked on the Manhattan Project in the U.S., developing the atomic bomb, but was “some things didn’t
work out for me” and he had to return home and take on something new, hence his work on DNA. He is
new to biochemistry and has had rather limited success with the project. Wilkins and the “men’s club”
are still trying to figure out Rosalind as a woman and even a potential object of romance, more
interested in her lipstick than in her mind. (The real Franklin did not wear makeup.) The demeaning
sobriquet “Rosy” is born. Meanwhile, Watson is hot in pursuit of French au pair girls, while he and
Crick ponder DNA “gossip”—half-understood facts: What is it made of? What shape? How are the
parts put together?
5. “Goal-Oriented”
Franklin hydrates dry DNA and draws it into a mucoid strand as fine as spider’s silk, in which the DNA
molecules align in a way suitable for X ray crystallography. She gets her first good photographs.
Wilkins is impressed but Franklin will not communicate with him; he has to get what information he
can from her technician Raymond Gosling. Franklin brusquely rejects Wilkins’s speculations about the
helical structure of DNA. “You may be guessing right, and you may not. You won’t know until you’ve
done the work. And once you’ve done the work, you won’t need the guesses, because you’ll have the
answer. So what’s the point of the guesses?” She rudely dismisses Wilkins, telling him to keep his
guesses to himself. Wilkins is very resentful and complains to Randall that DNA was his project and it
was his understanding that Franklin was taken on to work in his unit (implying that he regarded her as a
subordinate). Meanwhile, Watson finally meets some au pair girls, pursuing them in as “goal-oriented”
a way as he pursues the secrete of DNA.
“Do you know what I like about our kind of work? You can be happy or unhappy—it makes no
difference. It doesn’t matter whether you like what you find or hate it. You live with it and say, ‘So that’s
how it is.’”
—Rosalind Franklin2
6. “Buried Treasure”
Wilkins and Watson become reacquainted over lunch at Crick’s flat. Wilkins sees science as a
communal activity and resents Franklin’s secrecy; he subconsciously lets the “Rosy” nickname slip.
(Watson later received some scorn from fellow scientists for using the name in his 1968 book, The
Double Helix, which many found demeaning to her memory.) Watson goes to King’s in search of
Franklin, looking first in the men-only common room, then waiting for her at her basement laboratory.
He finds her rude and uncommunicative. He attends her lecture and misinterprets her comment about
the amount of water in DNA. Franklin is working mainly on the dry, crystalline “A form” rather than
the wet, longer “B form.” Watson socializes increasingly with Wilkins, and Wilkins welcomes the
collegial relationship that he lacks with Franklin.
Word comes down that the prominent American chemist Linus Pauling has begun working on DNA,
much to Watson and Crick’s alarm. This adds all the more urgency to their race to be first, and they
hastily build a hideous molecular model based on Watson’s misinterpretation of Franklin’s lecture and
the amount of water in the molecule. Wilkins and Franklin travel to Cambridge to see the model, which
is ridiculously wrong on many levels. Franklin enjoys a smirk at their expense. Bragg is embarrassed at
such a blunder being made in the Cavendish, and tells Crick to leave DNA alone and get back to work
on hemoglobin. Franklin is exasperated with the Watson and Crick approach, model-building without
doing any experiments. She derides them to Vittorio as “Children! Adolescents!” She herself is
frustrated with her work because the A form is not yielding evidence of a helix. Franklin laments that
all the British pubs are for men only, and there is no one she can talk to about her work; “they’re
making me hard.” But she is tenacious and doesn’t want to abandon it. Vittorio recommends that she
perform a laborious Patterson calculation on her photographs of the A form.
2
Quotes are from the Rosalind Franklin and Maurice Wilkins characters in the movie. I do not know if they have
any historical accuracy and would not assume them to be quotes from the actual persons.
7. “It’s Not Fair”
It’s 1952. Watson, Crick, and Wilkins increasingly talk about DNA with each other. Crick explains to
Watson how X-ray diffraction photos are interpreted. He is desperate to get hold of a good X-ray
diffraction photo of DNA, which would give them valuable data on the geometry of the molecule.
Franklin persists in her work, but is still pursuing the relatively unpromising A form, which gives the
clearest diffraction photos but no evidence of helical structure. Pauling’s interest in DNA is making
Watson and Crick nervous, but Pauling is unable to travel to England to see the X-ray work because the
U.S. State Department has revoked his passport owing to his opposition to the hydrogen bomb.
(Congress suspected Pauling of membership in the Communist Party because of his antinuclear
activism.) Thus Pauling is cut off from the vital data that might have enabled him to be first to solve the
DNA problem.
8. “Little Problems”
It’s decided that Franklin will work on the A form and the increasingly morose Wilkins will work
independently on the B form. Franklin is hard at work on the tedious Patterson calculation, using a
hand-cranked adding machine. She comes to the conclusion that the A form is not symmetrical, and
sends Wilkins a mock obituary for the seemingly discredited DNA helix. Raymond hints to Wilkins that
Franklin may be thinking of leaving King’s. Crick, meanwhile, realizes that the complementary pairing
of the DNA bases could be the key to DNA replication. Kendrew arranges an opportunity for Watson
and Crick to meet with Erwin Chargaff, who discovered in studies of the DNA of multiple species that
A is paired with T and G is paired with C. The imperious Chargaff mocks Watson and Crick’s
amateurish knowledge of nucleotide chemistry and wishes them well with their “hobby,” yet Watson
and Crick extract from this unpleasant encounter a valuable clue to solving the problem. Meanwhile
Linus Pauling’s son, Peter Pauling, arrives at the Cavendish.
“Satisfaction doesn’t come from knowing the solution. It comes from knowing why it’s the solution.” —
Rosalind Franklin
9. “Little Boys”
Watson and Crick pump Peter Pauling for information on what the old man is up to. Peter discloses that
he’s interested in genes. While this is much to Watson and Crick’s alarm, Linus Pauling screws up just
as they did. He proposes a structure with three chains and the phosphates in the center. Watson and
Crick are gleeful that he’s gotten it wrong, but aware that Pauling is now dangerous, “a Linus/lioness
cheated of its prey.” Pauling is getting uncomfortably close, and it’s all the more urgent to beat him to
the prize.
Vittorio visits Franklin in London. She shows him the boy’s club (common room) and tells him how
miserable she is there. She is discouraged by the asymmetry of the A form and is thinking of leaving
King’s for Birbeck College, letting Wilkins have DNA all to himself. Watson takes the Pauling paper to
Franklin’s lab and tries to impress upon her the urgent need to “pool our resources” and solve the
problem together before Pauling gets it right. Franklin angrily chastises him, “What resources to you
have to offer? You think this is a little game! You think this is playground and I’ve got the ball. ...Little
boys! You’re all just little boys! Go and play with your little boy games. I am not a little boy. I don’t
like your game and I won’t play.” Wilkins overhears her outburst and now the bond between him and
Watson is ever stronger. Watson shows the Pauling paper to Wilkins, and Wilkins shows Watson one of
Franklin’s best photos of the B form (history knows this as the famous Photo 51). Watson is
dumbfounded by what he thinks the photo reveals, and he rushes back to Cambridge, sketching it from
memory on a newspaper and sharing the sketch with Crick. Bragg is convinced that they’re onto
something and gives permission for them to build another model, with the machine shop providing
them with better scale models of the nitrogenous bases.
10. “She Hasn’t Seen It”
Frustrated with the asymmetry of the A form, Franklin goes back to work on B. She now begins to
arrive at some of the same conclusions that Watson and Crick have reached, such as the phosphates
being on the outside, and she realizes that the two backbones must go in opposite directions. She
prepares a publication on evidence for a helix in the B form, which falls into Watson and Crick’s hands
through somewhat illicit means not depicted in the movie. With insights from her X ray photo and her
manuscript, Watson and Crick put together a model of the helical backbones. They have it all now
except how to fit the bases together on the inside without the helix bulging erratically.
11. “Pairing the Bases”
While Franklin continues writing papers on the ladderlike double helix, Watson and Crick furiously
ponder the necessities of DNA geometry: the Chargaff A–T, G–C ratios and the pitch and uniform
diameter of the molecule. As Wilkins belatedly decides to collaborate fully with Watson and Crick,
Watson fumbles with cardboard scale models of the bases. With a slight modification in the assumed
chemical form of the bases, Watson at last finds that hydrogen-bonded A–T pairs have exactly the same
size as G–C pairs. They’ve got it! They party in celebration at the pub while Franklin still labors in
silent solitude.
12. “It’s Beautiful”
In something tantamount to a spiritual mood, Watson and Crick invited others to scrutinize their model,
rapturously explaining its geometry first to others at the Cavendish Laboratory and then to those from
outside: first Wilkins, who seems almost heartbroken as he relinquishes the credit to them, and then
Franklin. She seems unconcerned about who gets the credit, but agrees that it looks right.
“It’s beautiful Francis. Very simple. Very true.”
—Maurice Wilkins2
“I might have seen it, but I didn’t.”
—Rosalind Franklin