PRESENT VIEW of the chemical structure of DNA sees the mole*
cole as a long chain in tvhich the four nucleotide bases can he ar-
ranged in any arbitrary order. Although the proportion of ade-
nine is always equal to that of thymine and the proportion of gua-
nine is always equal to that of cytosine, the ratio of adenine-thy-
mine to guanine-cytosine can vary over a large range, depending
on the biological source of the DNA. With the elaboration of this
single-strand structure
it became possible to envision that genetic
information
is encoded
in the DNA molecule
as a
specific
se-
quence of the four nucleotide bases (see illustration on next page).
been painted, had Shakespeare and Pi-
the
arts and sciences in regard to the
fabulous monkey typists complete their
casso
not
existed.
But
of how many
uniqueness of their creations,
random work
at the
British Museum,
scientific
achievements
can
this
be
Before discussing the proposition of
And so both
creations
are from
that
claimed? One could almost say that, with
differential uniqueness of creation it is
point of view unique. We are not really
very few exceptions,
it is not the men
necessary to make an explicit statement
concerned,
however,
with
the
exact
that make
science,
it
is
science
that
of the meaning of “art” and of “science.”
word sequence. We are concerned with
makes the men. What A does today, B
My
understanding
of
these
terms
is
the content. Thus we admit that people
orC or D could surely do tomorrow.”
based on the view that both the
arts
other than Watson and
Crick would
'
reading this passage, I found my-
and the sciences are activities that en-
eventually have described a satisfactory
self in full agreement on the general lack
deavor
to
discover and
communicate
molecular structure for DNA. But then
of literary skills among men of science,
truths about the world. The domain to
the character of Timon and the story of
I was
surprised, however,
to
find an
which the artist addresses himself is the
his trials and tribulations not only might
eminent scientist embracing historicism
inner, subjective world of the emotions,
have been written without Shakespeare
(the theory championed by Hegel and
Artistic
statements
therefore
pertain
but
also
were
written
without
him.
Marx holding that history is determined
mainly
to
relations
between
private
Shakespeare merely reworked the story
by immutable forces rather than by hu-
events of affective significance. The do-
of Timon he had read in William Paint-
man agency) as an explanation for the
main of the scientist, in contrast, is the
er’s collection of classic tales. The Palace
evolution of science while at the same
outer, objective world of physical phe-
of Pleasure, published 40 years earlier,
fime professing belief in the libertarian
nomena. Scientific statements therefore
and
Painter
in
turn had used
as
his
great man
view of history for the evo-
pertain mainly to relations between or
sources Plutarch and Lucian, But then
lution of art. Since
it had not occurred
among public events. Thus the transmis-
we do not
really care about Timon’s
to me that anyone could hold such con-
sion of information and the perception
story; what counts are the deep insights
tradictory, and
to me obviously
false,
of meaning in that information consti-
into human emotions that Shakespeare
views concerning
these two most im-
tute the central content of both the arts
provides in his play. He shows us here
portant domains of human creation, I
and the sciences. A creative act on the
how a man may make his response to
began to ask scientific friends and col-
part of
either an
artist or a
scientist
the
injuries of
life, how he may turn
leagues
whether
they
too,
by
any
would mean his formulation of a new
from lighthearted benevolence to pas-
chance, thought
there was an impor-
meaningful statement about the world,
sionate hatred toward his fellow men.
tant qualitative difference between the
an addition to the accumulated capital
Can one be sure, however, that Timon
achievements
of
art
and
of
science,
of what
is sometimes called “our
cul-
is unique from
this bare-bones stand-
aamely that the former are unique and
tural heritage.” Let us therefore examine
point of the work’s artistic essence? No,
the latter inevitable. To my even greater
the proposition
that only Shakespeare
because who
is to say that
if Shake-
surprise,
I found
that most
of them
could
have
formulated
the
semantic
speare had not existed no other drama-
seemed to agree with Chargaff. Yes, they
structures represented by Timon, where-
tist would have
provided
for us
the
said,
it is quite true that we would not
as people other than Watson and Crick
same insights? Another dramatist would
ave had Timon of Athens or “Les Des-
might have made
the communication
surely have used an entirely
different
©oiselles
d Avignon"
if
Shakespeare
represented by their paper, “A Structure
story (as Shakespeare himself did in his
ana Picasso had not existed, but if Wat-
for Deoxyribonucleic Acid,” published
much more
successful King Lear
)
to
son and Crick had not existed, we would
in Nature in the spring of 1953.
treat the same theme and he might have
ave had the DNA double helix any-
First, it is evident that the exact word
succeeded in pulling
it
off. The reason
v ay. Therefore, contrary to my first im-
sequence that Watson and Crick pub-
no one seems to have done
it since
is
|
P
(
r<-‘ss *on>
it does not seem to be all that
fished in Nature would not have been
that Shakespeare had already done
it
o ri°us
that
this proposition has
little
written
if the authors had not existed,
in 1607, just as no one discovered the
V
'
osophieal or historical merit. Hence
any more than the exact word sequence
structure
of DNA
after Watson and
s
all now attempt to show that there
of Timon would have been written with-
Crick had already discovered it in 1953.
gno such Profound gfferenc^
W80^^to as-
Approved For Release^0O1/O3/26
: CIA-RDP96-OO787Rifl02OOO8OO54-5
HYDROGEN BONDS
serting that Timon
is uniquely Shake*
speare’s, because no other dramatist, ah
though he might have brought us more
or less the same insights, would have
done it in quite the same exquisite way
as Shakespeare. But here we must not
shortchange Watson and Crick and take
for granted that those other people who
eventually would have found the struc-
ture of DNA would have found it in just
the same way and produced the same
revolutionary effect on contemporary bi-
ology. On the basis of my acquaintance
with the personalities then engaged
in
faying to uncover the structure of DNA;
I believe that if Watson and Crick had
not existed, the insights they provided
in one single package would have come
out much more gradually over a period
of many months or years. Dr. B might
have seen that DNA is a double-strand
helix, and Dr. C might later have red
ognized the hydrogen bonding between
the strands. Dr. D later yet might have
proposed a complementary purine-py?
rimidine bonding, with Dr. E in a sub*
sequent paper proposing
the
specific
adenine-thymine and
guanine-cytosine
nucleotide pairs. Finally, we might have
had to wait for Dr. G to propose the
replication mechanism of DNA based on
the complementary nature of the two
strands. All the while Drs. H, I, J, K and
L would have been confusing the issue
by publishing incorrect structures and
proposals. Thus I fully agree with the
judgment offered by Sir Peter Medawai:
in his review of The Double Helix: "The
great thing about [Watson and Crick’s}
discovery was
its completeness,
its
air
of
finality.
If Watson and Crick had
been seen groping toward an answer,
if
j
they had published a partly right solu-
tion and had been obliged to follow it
up with corrections and glosses, some
of them made by other people;
if the:
solution had come out piecemeal instead;
of in a blaze of understanding; then
it
would still have been a great episode in
biological history; but something more
in the common run of things; something
splendidly
well
done,
but not
in
the
grand romantic manner.”
*%
,•
.
'
'
Why is
it that so many scientists ap-
X
V parently fail to see that
it can be
i**®
[j
said of both art and science that where-
$****’*•},
s'
as "what A does
today, B or C or D
B
\
could surely do tomorrow,” B or C
or
vL
1—
ff
D might nevertheless not do it as well asi
A,
in the same “grand romantic man?
ner.” I think a variety of reasons can be?
Approved For Release 2001/03/26
: CIA-RDP96-OO787f^O$2®4)08®@S4t|pr this strange
myopia. The first of them is simply that
WATSON-CRICK MODEL of the structure of DNA, the discovery of which was announced
most scientists are not familiar with the?
?^^>icture the artist’s act of creation in
cal
literature. In contrast, the modem
£ the terms of Hollywood: Cornel Wilde
wrB--, composer or painter
still needs
,> in the role of
-• Chctpin gazing fondly at Merle Oberon
works of Shakespeare, Bach or Leonar-
as his muse and mistress Ceorge Sand
.*• and then sitting down at the Pleyel pi-
p. anoforte to compose his “Preludes.” As
>v
scientists know full well, science is done
:
quite differently: Dozens of stereotyped
and ambitious
researchers
are
slaving
.. away in as many identical laboratories,
all trying to make
similar
discoveries,
all using more or less the same knowl-
edge and techniques, some of them sue*
ceeding and some
not.
Artists, on the
i
other hand, tend to conceive of the sci-
.
•
entific
act
of creation
in
equally
un*
p realistic terms: Paul Muni in the role of
>. the one and only Louis Pasteur, who
,t
f while burning the midnight
oil
in
his
#< laboratory has
the
inspiration
to take
ft some bottles from the shelf, mix their
it* contents and thus discover the vaccine
§* for rabies. Artists, in turn, know that art
M-
is done
quite
differently:
Dozens
of
stereotyped
and
ambitious
writers,
ic painters and composers are slaving away
in as many identical garrets,
all trying
fc to produce similar works, all using more
0~ or less the same knowledge and tech-
ip niques, some succeeding and some not.
A second reason
is that the belief in
the inevitability of scientific discoveries
••V. appears
to
derive
support
from
the
p often-told tales of famous cases in the
history of science where the same dis-
§h, covery was made independently two or
; &• more times by different people. For in-
P- stance,
the
independent
invention
of
the calculus by Leibniz and Newton or
'M the independent recognition of the role
if
of natural selection in evolution by Wal-
t-
|
lace and Darwin. As the study of such
it
5. “multiple discoveries” by Robert Merton
ie
I
of Columbia University has shown, how-
«
ever, oh detailed examination they are
d
rarely,
if
ever,
identical. The
reason
it
f; they are said to be multiple
is simply
»
"
that in spite of their differences one can
e
i
recognize a semantic overlap between
g
-
them that
is transformable into a con-
c
-
gruent set of ideas.
The third, and somewhat more pro-
found, reason is that whereas the cumu-
lative character of scientific creation
is
at once apparent to every scientist, the
{
similarly cumulative character of
artis-
?
;
tic creation is not For instance, it is ob-
vious that no present-day working ge-
*
neticist has any need to read the origi-
v
nal papers of Mendel, because they have
s
i
been
completely
superseded
by
the
r work of the past century. Mendel’s pa-
-
-
pers contain no useful information that
>
cannot be
better
obtained
from any
do, which, so it is thought, have not been
superseded at all. In spite of the seeming
truth of this proposition, it must be said
that art
is no less cumulative than
sci-
ence, in that artists no more work in a
traditionless vacuum than scientists do.
Artists also build on the work of their
predecessors; they start with and later
improve on the styles and insights that
have been handed down to them from
their teachers, just as scientists do. To
stay
with
our main
example,
Shake-
speare’s Timon has its roots in the works
of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides.
It was those authors of Greek antiquity
who discovered tragedy as a vehicle for
communicating deep
insights
into
af-
fects,
and
Shakespeare,
drawing
on
many earlier sources,
finally developed
that
Greek
discovery
to
its
ultimate
height. To some limited extent, there-
fore, the plays of the Greek dramatists
have been superseded by Shakespeare’s.
Why, then, have Shakespeare’s plays not
been superseded by the work of later,
lesser dramatists?
Here we finally do encounter an im-
portant difference between the creations
of art and of science, namely the feasi-
bility of paraphrase. The semantic con-
tent of an artistic work—a play, a cantata
or a painting—is critically dependent on
the exact manner of its realization; that
is, the greater an
artistic work
is, the
more likely
it
is that any omissions or
changes from the original detract from
its
content.
' In
other words,
to
para-
phrase a great work of art—for instance
to rewrite Timon—without loss of artis-
tic quality requires a genius equal to
the genius of die original creator. Such
a successful paraphrase would, in fact,
constitute a great work of art in its own
right. The semantic content of a great
scientific paper, on the other hand, al-
though its impact at the time of publi-
cation may also be critically dependent
on the exact manner in which it is pre-
sented, can later be paraphrased with-
out serious loss of semantic content by
lesser scientists. Thus the simple state-
ment “DNA
is
a
double-strand,
self-
complementary
helix” now
suffices
to
communicate the essence of Watson and
Crick’s great discovery, whereas “A man
responds to the injuries of life by turn-
ing from
lighthearted benevolence
to
passionate
hatred
toward
his
fellow
men”
is merely a platitude and not a
paraphrase of Timon. It took the writing
of King Lear
to paraphrase (and im-
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fleTI
EH
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#nu?r
],4 s supersewa In©
latter
^e [r reflection in human thought. Hence
Sharpen, ean dramatic
there is nothing to be found in the inner
.The
fourth,
and
probably
deepest
and artistic creations are cut sim-
reason
for
the
apparent
Tfrom whole cloth. Here B or C or D
among scientists of the propositmnjl^
^
find tomorrow what
artistic creations are unique a
_
A found today, because what A found
tific creations are not can be attnbu
It fa not altogether
t„
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‘r ££££ o! con,sc, to bit* f
titude toward the events m the on er
mp
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attitude toward the two
tituae lowiuu
,,
end the inner world. The outer wodd,
which science
tries to fathom,
is often
viewed from the standpoint of material-
ism. according to which events and the
relations between them have an
exis-
tence independent of the human mind.
^Smological attitude toward the two
worlds, since of these two
antithetical
gaSS^ 3,‘5s;s:s;:.»=
t-ason
for
the
appaie
vonJsltion that
ply from whole cloth. Here B or C or
Materialism envisions that thanks*§
mong scientists o
ie p
p
scien _
couid not possibly find tomorrow w
information reality is mirrored in |-
irtistic creations are urnq
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a found today, because what A found
whereas idealism envisions^
ific creations are not can be tfta
had never been there. It is not altogether
the
mi. ^
iaformaUon reality is|
o
a
contradictory
surprising, of course, to find
this
split
t mt dmnks to
itude toward the events ml
e^temological attitude toward the two
co
ed
y
^ provided the in~*
md the inner world. The outer wo
,
P
of these tw0
antithetical
on the oth
about the world-.i
which science
tries to fathom, ^
often
pM
hical
s;g^mlnd n^
VieWicSn« to whth°events and the
thought, materialism isoW
already highly abstracted form, namelyj
1Sm, according to
n c
^
satisfactory approach to art and idea
_ structures. In the preconscious proc-#
r'^Td^nSS SAuraunralud.
an unrattrfac.ory .ppraad*
»
ot convening to 1™™? dnU of*
Hanu. tf» ouler world
b
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ta fte paa 20 you*^ W
.fra, scientific ^liscoveries »W. P* £&£ rf
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ing wild strawberries m « pubhcpark.
re^
o{ materialism
v>
idealism
than riie^lecn
^^^
the berries A does not find to ay
the form of what has come
ma
•
^
f data ahoutM
or U will
—
same time, many scientists view the in-
ner world, which
art
tries
to fathom,
from
the
standpoint
of
idealism,
ac-
cording to which events and
relations
than the selective uku
—
-
mation. Thus since the mind does not wl
gain access to the full set of data aboutgil
the world, it can neither mirror nor con-^.l
struct reality. Instead for the mind real-#
ity
is a set of structural transforms ot g
(Merle Ober*
, his “Preh
<A
l;Bn,rnntlV.
*
'
oiwTiary data taken from the world. This
knowledge.
In
the
parlance
of s^uc-
in that
stronger
structures are lonneu
Join “weaker” structures through selec-
with which primary scientific data are
'tive destruction of information. Any set
. made congruent in the mental-abstrao-
^ primary
data becomes
meaningful
tion process. Hence data that canno^ be
only after a series of such operations has
transformed into a structure congruent
s0 transformed.it that it has become con-
with canonical know edge are a dead
{jruent with a stronger
structure
pre-
end;
in
the
last
analysis they remain
existing in the mind. Neurophysiological
meaningless. That is they remain mean-
studiescarried out in recent years on the
ingless until a way has been shown to
process of visual perception
in higher
transform them into a structure that
mammals have not only shown directly
congruent with the canon,
that the brain actually operates accord-
As far as uniqueness of discovery
is
*
f
'
.
li
T
i- nlm
rnrsr'pmPfl.
StmCturS-llSTtl
Icfl<3s
tO
til©
offer an easily understood illustration of
recognition that every
creative
act m
,
. or>
.
the arts and sciences
is both common-
FinaUy, we may
consider
the
rele-
place and unique. On the one hand,
it
, vance of structuralist philosophy for the
is commonplace in
;
two problems in the history of science
is an innate, or genetically determined
.under discussion here. As
far
as
pre-
correspondence
!!! the ^aosfomational
i maturity
of
discovery
is
concerned,
operationsthatdifferentmdividualsper-
U ^SlismprovidesL with an under-
form on the same primary data^ Wrth
V standing of why a discovery cannot be
reference to science
cognitive psychol-
l appreciated until
it can be connected
ogy has taught that different ^ividuah
Stoically
to
contemporary
canonical
recognize the same chaimess
of a chair
m
because they
all make a given
set of
mental structure. With reference to art,
analytic
psychology
has
taught
that
there is a sameness in the subconscious
life of different individuals because an
innate human archetype causes them to
make
the same
structural
transforma-
tions of the events of the inner world.
And with reference to both art and sci-
ence
structural
linguistics
has
taught
that communication between different
individuals is possible only because an
innate human grammar causes them to
transform a given set of semantic sym-
bols into the same syntactic structure.
On the other hand, every creative act is
unique in the sense that no two individ-
uals are quite the same and hence never
perform
exactly the same transforma-
tional operations on a given set of pri-
mary data. Although all creative acts in
both art and science axe therefore both
commonplace and
unique, some may
nonetheless be more unique than others.