The Shape of Life

Jim Watson published The Double Helix in 1968, during my first year of teaching at Harvard. I well remember, as a baby assistant professor cowed into silence, the disapprobation of my senior scientific colleagues who knew the dark and funny side of actual research (the jealousies, the pranks, the pettiness, the sexual tensions) but didn't think the subject fit for public admission or discussion. Watson's irreverent, honest, and eminently readable chronicle of himself in his early twenties, on the make in many ways, became a classic in the narration of science as actually done, rather than ideally portrayed.