The Island of Dr. Mirones

Dear Friends,

Today, my eternal fame has been secured by the flip of a coin. Yes, I have acquired a lasting legacy for myself today by merely flicking my thumb and observing the side of a quarter which faced skyward, glinting at me with its own immortal eyes. Or was the quarter tails? I cannot recall. In any case, today Francis and I flipped a coin to decide whether we should call the double helix the Watson-Crick structure or the Crick-Watson structure in our submission of our findings to Cambridge. Sure now, once and for all, the Watson name will live on in remembrance of my great discovery.

And yet, I am dissatisfied. Dissatisfied with the randomness of it all, the entire process of discovery. I cannot help but consider many times throughout my journey a discovery seemed to fall out of the sky, granting me its ownership for no particular reason concerning my abilities. And now, thanks only to a flipped quarter, my name occupies the first space of our duo, and as history has proven, the first name is always remembered and revered above the second. Has our sense of history in general been decided upon randomly, as if by the flip of a coin? Have the names and places we have come to know as great entities been improperly classified? Surely, in the annals of history, someone got far too much credit—perhaps everyone.

What will become of Linus Pauling? What will his name evoke in fifty, sixty years? It seems remarkably unfair and inaccurate that his entire existence on earth be marginalized, reduced to the status of “runner up to Watson and Crick.” He botched one simple moment in his life—he was the greatest chemist of the time—and developed a triple-helix strand of DNA which proved incorrect. With his error, I took the advantage, reducing his helixes by one, and increasing my reputation by infinity. What’s more, before it was clear that Pauling was out to get the prize, Francis and I had been told by Sir Lawrence Bragg told us that DNA was off limits to the Cambridge unit because it belonged to the workers at King’s. It was his entry into this game that enabled us to win.

As my sister Elizabeth typed my manuscript for Nature to announce the discovery, I could not help but feel the moment had been compromised. It had not been earned. My achievements were no more the result of my own intelligent design than my own genetic makeup. If they are merely the product of unpredicted, random events, then it is not truly by my will that I attain my goals, but simply being in the right place or the right time.

It could be that I am simply dealing with success at this time–I hear it is as stressful as it is joyous. Perhaps it is a bit presumptuous of me to assume that my breakthrough will have the impact I describe, however, one must understand that this discovery of DNA is not just a discovery of a new fact of life–it is THE fact of life.

Cordially,

James