Breaking the silence

" Like all good memoirs it has not been emasculated by considerations of good taste. " That was Peter Medawar's verdict on The Double Helix, Jim Watson's ebullient succès de scandale. Watson's exuberant style, let it be said right away, is not Maurice Wilkins's. He and Francis Crick were outraged by Watson's account — now a modern classic, at number seven in the American Modern Library's roll of the most important books of the twentieth century — and tried their best to prevent its publication. In 1989 Crick came out with his own reflections, and, in between and subsequently, the story of DNA has been told and retold by historians, by journalists and by scientists in books and articles without number. Rosalind Franklin, Wilkins's uncongenial colleague at King's College in London, was increasingly depicted, especially by a strident galère of rampant feminists, as the tragic (for she died at the age of 37) and wronged heroine, traduced and shamelessly robbed of credit for her work on DNA. The chief villain, according to a deplorable biography by Anne Sayre, a novelist and friend of Rosalind Franklin's, was Maurice Wilkins and it has taken Brenda Maddox's luminous life of Franklin (The Dark Lady of DNA) to restore some balance. Throughout all the uproar Maurice Wilkins has kept his peace, and only now, in his mid-eighties, has he set down his own story. Francis Crick has related that when searching for a job after the Second World War, he consulted the physicist Harrie Massey for advice. Massey suggested a visit to Wilkins, then already ensconced at King's. As Crick recalls, " Massey smiled to himself as he said this, and I sensed that Maurice was in some way unusual ". Crick did not in the event find him so, and thus began an enduring friendship. Yet Wilkins is an unusual man, and he emerges in his book as reticent, vacillating, shrinking always from confrontation and baffled by the deviousness of others. His honesty and guileless transparency made him an ineffectual predator in the jungle of academic politics, but won him the trust and loyalty of his students and associates. Wilkins sprang from nonconformist, Unitarian stock, and the austere Victorian moral principles that this background imposed marked him for life. He writes pleasantly of his happy and secure childhood in New Zealand and later in Dublin, London and Birmingham. By the time he was …