- ooPeoorabarety-anch Unierereyes in Scientific Discovery A molecular geneticist reflects on two general historical questions: (1) What does it mean to say a discovery is “ahead of its time”? (2) Are scientific creations any less unique than artistic creations? he fantastically rapid progress of molecular genetics in the past 25 years now obliges merely middle- aged participants in its early develop- ment to look back on their early work - from a depth of historical perspective that for scientific specialties fowering in earlier times came only after all the wit- nesses of the first blossoming were long dead. It is as if the late-18th-century colleagues of Joseph Priestley and An- toine Lavoisier had still been active in chemical research and teaching in the 1930's, after atomic structure and the nature of the chemical bond had been revealed. This somewhat depressing personal vantage provides a singular op- portunity to assay the evolution of a scientific field, In reflecting on the his- tory of molecular genetics from the viewpoint of my own experierice I have found that two of its most famous inci- _ : dents—Oswald Avery's identification of DNA as the active principle in bacterial transformation and hence as genetic ma- terial, and James Watson and Francis Crick’s discovery of the DNA double he- lix—illuminate two general problems of cultural history. The case of Avery throws light on the question of whether it is meaningful or merely tautologous to say that a discovery is “ahead of its time,” or premature. And the case of Watson and Crick can be used, and in fact has been used, to discuss the ques- tion of whether there is anything unique in a scientific discovery, in view of the likelihood that if Dr. A had not discov- ered Fact X today, Dr. B would have discovered it tomorrow, [eve yeas ago I published a bricf ret-' netics, with puBREQMBE ROT, ReleASe SOUT TOS LG. IRTP RS. 84 by Gunther S. Stent origins. In that historical account I men- tioned neither Avery’s name nor DNA- mediated bacterial transformation. My essay elicited a letter to the editor by a microbiologist, who complained: “It is a sad and surprising omission that... Stent makes no mention of the definitive proof of DNA as the basic hereditary substance by O. T. Avery, C. M. Mac- Leod and Maclyn McCarty, The growth of [molecular genetics} rests upon this experimental proof.... I am old enough | to remember the excitement ‘and en- . thusiasm induced by the publication of the paper by Avery, MacLeod and Mc- Carty, Avery, an effective bacteriologist, was a quiet, self-effacing, non-disputa- tious gentleman, These characteristics of personality should not [cause] the gen- eral scientific public...to let his name go unrecognized.” I was taken aback by this letter and replied that I should indeed have men- tioned Avery's 1944 proof that DNA is ‘the hereditary substance. I went on to _ say, however, that in my opinion it is not true that the growth of molecular. genetics rests on Avery's proof. For many years that proof actually had little impact on geneticists. The reason for the delay was not that Avery’s work was un- known to or mistrusted by geneticists but that it was “premature.” My prima facie reason for saying Avery's discovery was premature is that it was not appreciated in its day. By lack of appreciation I do not mean that Avery’s discovery went unnoticed, or even that it was not considered impor- tant. What [ do mean is that geneticists did not seem to be able to do much with it or build on it. That is, in its day | This statement can be readily sup- ported by an examination of the scien- tific literature. For example, a convine- ing demonstration of the lack of appre- ciation of Avery's discovery is provided by the’1950 golden jubilee of genetics symposium “Genetics in the 20th Cen- tury.” In the proceedings of that sym- posium some of the most eminent ge- -., | neticists published essays that surveyed: the progress of the first 50 years of ge- netics and assessed its status at that time. Only one of the 26 essayists saw fit to make more than a passing refer- ence to Avery's discovery, then six years old. He was a colleague of Avery’s at the Rockefeller Institute, and he ex- pressed some’ doubt that the active transforming principle was really pure DNA. The then leading philosopher of ° the gene, H. J. Muller of Indiana Uni- versity, contributed an essay on the na- ture of the gene that mentions neither Avery nor DNA, So why was Avery's discovery not ap- preciated in its day? Because it was “premature.” But is this really an ex- planation or is it merely an empty fue ‘tology? In other words, is there a way of providing a criterion of the prema- turity of a discovery other than its fail- ure to make an impact? Yes, there is such a criterion: A discovery is prema- ture if its iinplications cannot be con- nected by a series of simple logical steps to canonical, or generally accepted, ‘knowledge. Why could Avery's discovery not be connected with canonical knowledge? Ever since DNA had been discovered in - the cell nucleus by Friedrich Miescher in 1869 it had been suspected of exert- 0078 exses. TROCE2000 OGSi4ug proc - s suspicion became stronger —: a : Ped a, SHEN toey ee : Pit is j par rep art,
. * a7 x in the 1920's, when it was found that DNA is a major component of the chro-_ wad. ron Release @ep . mosomAPPEQ miglecular nature of DNA, however, made it well-nigh inconceivable that DNA could be the carrier of hereditar information. First, until well into the 1930's DNA was generally thought to be merely a tetranucleotide composed of one unit each of adenylic, guanylic, thymidylic and cytidylic acids. Second, PICASSO'S “LES DESMOISELLES D'AVIGNON,” painted in Par- ia in 1907, is often cited hy art historians as the first major Cubist painting und a milestone in the development of modern art. It fs reproduced here as an archetype of the proposition that works of ort}etic creation are unique Approve Or Relekee Bow hos26" even when it was finally realized by the — BOB eisai W PABSUHE BT Jarl the tetranucleotide hypothesis required, it was still widely believed the tetranu- cleotide was the basic repeating unit of the large DNA polymer in which the four units mentioned recur in regular sequence. DNA was therefore viewed as a uniform macromolecule that, like other monotonous polymers such as starsh or cellulose, is always the same, Rped 30 Hs 65 4riglogi al. source. ubiquitous presence of DNA in the chromosomes was therefore generally explained in purely physiological or structural terms, It was usually to the chromosomal protein that the informa- tional role of the genes had been as- signed, since the great differences in the specificity of structure that exist be-' tween various proteins in the same or- | isted, it would never have been painted), whereas works of scien- tifie creation are inevituble (in the sense that if Dr. A had not dis- covered Fact X today; Dr. B would discover it tomorrow). The vz- lidity of the proposition is disputed by. the author, The painting CIAIRDPSE400 FEFROCO200 08005405: New York. 85
sa a Fatale cea iuestcpemelrtnrtiloacabudstnes mle : ciated since the beginning of the cen- tury. The conceptual difficulty of as- signing the genetic role to DNA had not escaped Avery. In the conclusion of his paper he stated: “If the results of the present study of the transforming prin- ciple are confirmed, then nucleic acids must be regarded as possessing biologi- cal specificity the chemical basis of which is as yet undetermined.” By 1950, however, the tetranucleo- tide hypothesis had been overthrown, thanks Jargely to the work of Erwin Chargalk of the Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons. He showed that, contrary to the demands of that hypothesis, the four nucleotides are not necessarily present in DNA in equal proportions, He found, further-. _ more, that the exact nucleotide compo- sition of DNA differs according to its biological source, suggesting that DNA might not be a monotonous polymer after all, And so when two years later, in 1952, Alfred Hershey and Martha Chase of the Carnegie Institution’s lab- oratory in Cold Spring Harbor, N.Y., showed that on infection of the host bac- terium by a bacterial virus at least 80 percent of the viral DNA enters the cell and at least 80 percent of the viral pro- tein remains outside, it was possible to” connect their conclusion that DNA is the genetic material with canonical knowledge. Avery’s “as yet undeter- mined chemical basis of.the biological specificity of nucleic acids” could now be seen as the precise sequence of the four nucleotides along the polynucleo- tidé chain. The general impact of the -‘Hershey-Chase experiment was imme~- diate and dramatic. DNA was suddenly in and protein was out, as far as think- ing about the nature of the gene was concerned. Within a few months there arose the first speculations about the ge- netic code, and Watson and Crick were inspired to set out to discover the struc ture of DNA. — Of course, Avery's discovery is only one of many premature discoveries in the history of science. I have presented it here for consideration mainly because of my own failure to appreciate it when I joined Max Delbriick’s bacterial virus group at the California Institute of Technology in 1948. Since then I have often wondered what my later career would have been like if I had only been astute enough to appreciate Avery's dis- covery and infer from it four years be- fore Hershey and Chase that DNA must also be the Avgy experimental organism. OA sociated with the name of Gregor Men- del, whose discovery of the gene in 1865 had to wait 35 years before it was “redis- covered” at the turn of the century. Mendel’s discovery made no immediate impact, it can be argued, because the concept of discrete hereditary units. could not be connected with canonical knowledge of anatomy and physiology in the middle of the 19th century. Fur-_ thermore, the statistical methodology by means of which Mendel interpreted the results of his pea-breeding experi- ments was entirely foreign to the way of thinking of contemporary biologists. By the end of the 19th century, how- ever, chromosomes and the chromo- some-dividing processes of mitosis and meiosis had been discovered and Men- — del’s results could now be accounted for in terms of structures visible in the mi- croscope. Moreover, by then the appli- cation of statistics to biology had be- come commonplace. Nonetheless, in some respects Avery’s discovery is a more dramatic example of prematurity than Mendel’s, Whereas Mendel’s dis- covery seems hardly to have been men- tioned by anyone until its rediscovery, Avery's discovery was widely discussed and yet it could not be appreciated for eight years. Cases of delayed appreciation of a discovery exist also in the physical sci- ences. One example (as well as an ex- planation of its circumstances in terms of the concept to which I refer here as prematurity) has been provided by Michael Polanyi on the basis of his own experience. In the years 1914~1916 Polanyi published a theory of the ad- sorption of gases on solids which -as- sumed that the force attracting a gas — molecule to a solid surface depends only on the position of the molecule, and not ou the presence of other molecules, in the force field. In spite of the fact that Polanyi was able to provide strong ex- perimental evidence in favor of his the- ory, it was generally rejected. Not only was the theory rejected, it was also con- sidered so ridiculous by the leading au- thorities of the time that Polanyi be- lieves continued defense of his theory would have ended his professional ca- reer if he had not managed to publish work on more palatable ideas. The rea- son for the general rejection of Polanyi’s adsorption theory was that at the very . time he put it forward the role of elec- trical forces in the architecture of matter had just been discovered. Hence there proved iFMof Release-200i¥08/26-rO1A-RDPSEx00787RO0GAG0080084 tion of gases must also involve an elec- of view, however, was irreconcilable _ with Polanyi’s basic assumption of the mutual independence of individual gas molecules in the adsorption process. It vas only in the 1930's, after a new the- ory of cohesive molecular forces based on quantum-mechanical resonance rath- | er than on electrostatic attraction had been developed, that it became ‘con- ceivable gas molecules could behave in the way Polanyi’s experiments indicated they were actually behaving. Meanwhile Polanyi’ s theory had been ‘consigned so ‘authoritatively to the ashcan of crackpot ideas that it was. rediscovered only in the 1950's. Si. can the notion of prematurity be said to be a useful historical concept? First of all, is prematurity the only pos- sible explanation for the lack of ‘con- temporary appreciation of a discovery? Evidently not. For example, my micro- biologist critic suggested that it was. the “quiet, self-effacing, non-disputatious” personality of Avery that was the cause of the failure of his contribution to be recognized. Furthermore, in an essay on the history of DNA research Chargaft supports the idea that personal modesty and aversion to self-advertisement ac- count for the lack of contemporary sci- entific appreciation. He attributes the 75-year lag between Miescher’s discov- ery of DNA and the general apprecia- tion of its importance to Miescher’s be- ing “one of the quiet in the land,” who lived when “the giant publicity ma- chines, which today accompany even’ the smallest move on the chess-board of nature with enormous fanfares, were not yet in place.” Indeed, the 35-year hiatus POLYSACCHARIDE CAPSULE BACTERIA § STRAIN EXPERIMENT OF 1941 with which Oswald Avery correctly identified the chemical na- ture of the genetic material is regarded by the author as a classic example of a pre- She virulent PNEUMOCOCCL normal, or S-type, pneumococeus, a bacteri- | in ery ing ow He . vic m the lac del cal jue hir on me rep ma the olo um the the ules hary
-- jn the appreciation of ariel hee _<. ery is often UR ETOY dg -. ing been a mo mon feg A an _* gut-of-the-way Moravian monastery. 1 Hence the notion of prematurity pro- vides an alternative to the invocation— in my opinion an inappropriate one for ; the instances mentioned here—of. the {lack of publicity as an explanation for delayed appreciation. More important, does the prematurity concept pertain only to retrospective judgments made with the wisdom of i hindsight? No, I think it can be used also ; . to judge the present, Some recent dis- i coveries are still premature at this very , time. One example of here-and-now pre- -.- inaturity is the alleged finding that ex- - periential information received by an ~~ animal can be stored in nucleic acids or -# ather macromolecules. ~ Some 10 years ago there began to ap- _ pear reports by experimental psycholo- ; gists purporting to have shown that the } engram, or memory trace, of a task +. learned by a trained animal can be ; transferred to a naive animal by inject- *. ing or feeding the recipient with an ex- ¢. tract made from the tissues of the donor. .. At that time the central Jesson of mo- _{: lecular genetics—that nucleic acids and + proteins are informational macromole- ~, cules—had just gained wide currency, «: and the facile equation of nervous in- :, formation with genetic information soon “Jed to the proposal that macromole- *. cules—-DNA, RNA or. protein—store “s memory. As it happens, the experiments on which the macromolecular theory of # memory is based have been difficult to %.. repeat, and the results claimed for them }:. may indeed not be true at all, {t is none- 4. theless ‘significant that few neurophysi- ologists have even bothered to check um that causes pneumonia in mammals, is CELL DEBRIS (hence S) polysaccharide capsule that protects the bacterium from : the ordinary defense mechanisms of the infected animal. The avir- - went mutant, or R-type (R for rough), strain has lost the genetic  ¢apacity to form this protective capsule and hence is comparatively ‘2 harmoless “es approvert For Release:200 109/26 + GHA RDP 969678 7ROGEIGOOBOOE4 abil 1952 these experiments, even: though it is Relea pe saed yours nike ROP YR. . constitute a fact of capital importance. The lack of interest of neurophysiolo- gists in the macromolecular theory of memory can be accounted for by recog- nizing that the theory, whether true or false, is clearly premature. There is no chain of reasonable inferences by means _ of which our present, albeit highly im- perfect, view of the functional organiza- tion of the brain can be reconciled with the possibility of its acquiring, storing and retrieving nervous information by encoding such information in molecules of nucleic acid or protein. Accordingly for the community of neurophysiologists there is no point in devoting time to checking on experiments whose results, even if they were true as alleged, could not be connected with canonical know!l- edge. The concept of here-and-now prema- turity can be applied also to the trouble- some subject of ESP, or extrasensory perception. In the summer of 1948 I - happened to hear a heated argument at Cold Spring Harbor between two future mandarins of molecular biology, Salva- dor Luria of Indiana University and R. E. Roberts of the Camegie Institu- tion’s laboratory in Washington. Roberts was then interested in ESP, and he felt it had not been given fair consideration by the scientific community. As I re- call, he thought that.one might be able to set up experiments with molecular - beams that could provide more defini- tive data on the possibility of mind- induced departures from random dis- tributions than J. B. Rhine’s then much discussed card-guessing procedures. Luria declared that not only was he not . enclosed in a smooth UM CELL-FREE EXTRACT SERUM FACTORS (TRANSFORMING i} _| PRINCIPLE) | Vo WV. A STRAIN interested in Roberts’ proposed experi-- Reoezed jswas un- ograyt of anyone c psopsa ls a scien- tist even to discuss such rubbish. How could an intelligent fellow such as Rob- erts entertain the possibility of phenom- ena totally irreconcilable with the most elementary physical laws? Moreover, a phenomenon that is manifest only to specially endowed subjects, as claimed by “parapsychologists” to be the case for ESP, is outside the proper realm of _ science, which must deal with phenom- ena accessible to every observer. Rob- - erts replied that far from him being un- scientific, it- was Luria whose bigoted attitude toward the unknown was un- worthy of a true scientist. The fact that not everyone has ESP only means that it is an. elusive phenomenon, similar to musical genius, And just because a phe- nomenon cannot be reconciled with what we now know, we need not shut our eyes to it. On the contrary, it is the duty of the scientist to try to devise ex- periments designed to probe its truth or falsity. It seemed to me then that both Luria and Roberts were right, and in the in- tervening years I often thought about this puzzling disagreement, unable to resolve it in my own mind. Finally six — years ago I read a review of a book on ESP by my Berkeley colleague C. West Chur chman, and I began to see my way toward a resolution. Churchman stated that there are three different possible . scientific approaches to ESP. The first of these is that the truth or falsity-of ESP, like the truth or falsity of the existence’ of God or of the immortality of the soul, - is totally independent of either the “methods or the findings of empirical sci- ence. Thus the problem of ESP is de- TRANS- FORMATION S donor bacteria was added to mutant R recipient bacteria, some . of the mutants were found to regain the genetic capacity to form the capsule and thus were transformed back inte the normal, vir- ulent S type. Avery purified the transforming principle and suc- - ceeded in showing that it is DNA. The significance of Avery’s dis- 87 —
miu. fined out of existence, I imagine that t” was APPFAMAN OK, glease0 Churchman’s second approach is to reformulate the ESP phenomenon in terms of currently acceptable scientific © notions, such as unconscious perception or conscious fraud. Hence, rather than defining ESP out of existence, it is triv- ialized. The second approach probably would have been acceptable to Luria too, but not to Roberts. The third approach is to take the proposition of ESP literally and to at- tempt to examine in all seriousness the evidence for its validity. That was more or less Roberts’ position. As Churchman points out, however, this approach is not: likely to lead to satisfactory results. . Parapsychologists can maintain with GUANINE THYMINE OLD VIEW of the chemical struct the molecule as being merely a tetranucleo ure of DNA, widely held until well into the 193078, saw tide composed of one unit each of adenylic, gua« GAS CIA eee 6 F87 no other set of hypotheses in psychology - has received the degree of critical scru- tiny that has been given to ESP experi- ments. Moreover, many other phenom- ena have been accepted on much less statistical evidence than what is offered for ESP. The reason Churchman ad- vances for the futility of a strictly evi- dential approach to ESP is that in the absence of a hypothesis of how ESP could work it is not possible to decide whether any set of relevant observations can be accounted for only by ESP to the exclusion of alternative explanations. After reading Churchman’s review I realized that Roberts would have been ill-advised to proceed with his ESP ex- CYTOSINE amet 2 ar ADENINE nylie, thymidylic and cytidylic acids. This hypothesis demanded that the molecular weight of DNA be litele more than 1,000 and that the thymine and cytosine) occur in exact four nucleotide bases (adenine, guanine, ly equal proportions. Even when it was finally realized in the 1910's that the molecular weight of DNA is mach higher (in the millions or bil- lions), it was still widely believed that the tetranu large » ApRreved FORReHOaS G2 0011/0 3/260 to be an ob 88 € to the eventual acceptance of the idea that DNA is the genetic material. cleotide was the basi oo aF all times a predominantly accepted scigelaime __. open mind who is ready to embrace any _ history of science shows, however, that " remainder tables of bookstores, reaching ' The reasons for this, according to Char- | TOAD CAO RTORAS, on ese . ‘Les Desmoiselles d’Avignon’ not haver ! RQGO2OG0800S4.de, as Luria h, claimed, they would not be “scienc but because any positive evidence | might have found in favor of ESP wout have been, and would still be, prem}. ture, That is,/until it is possible to cof” nect ESP with canonical knowledge q _say, electromagnetic radiation and ne: _ rophysiology no demonstration of occurrence could be appreciated. i “Is the lack of appreciation of prem: ture discoveries merely attributable § the intellectual shortcoming or innaf conservatism of scientists who, if the were only more perceptive or mos open-minded, would give immediai recognition to any well-documented sc ule ag ranged ine is entific proposition? Polanyi is not of thdhine is opinion] Reflecting on the cruel fate ( his theory half a century after first a  Vancing it, {he declared:} “This miscafbeen - riage of the scientific method could nd asso have been avoided... {There must be igscient entific view of the nature of things, igvery emine tithe t i§ Marx aman | eg evolu atime A “grea lutior to me tradic views 4§ porta i begar Frve years ago Chargaff wrote one off !eagu the many reviews of The Doubled chin Helix, Watson’s autobiographical ac-g tant. count of his and Crick’s discovery of thef achie structure of DNA, In his review Char-@ name gaff observes.that scientific autobiogra:8 the I: phy is “a most awkward literary genre.) Surpr Most such works, he says, “give the im-} seem pression of having been written for the § said, have Mois and ] On g have Way. pres: obvic philc Ush: is no that it will eventually tum out to false or irrelevant.” new idea supported by the facts. The its practitioners do not appear to act According to that popular view.? ; them almost before they are published." § gaff, are not far to seek: scientists “lead § monotonous and uneventful lives and... besides often do not know how to write.”. Moreover, “there may also be profound- § er reasons for the general triteness of: t.
i i i . SBaOoB Wu ss uu ' =e or Vy ni- ™- of tbe Ast san: my The gat net { ace m= are evolution of science while at the same time professing belief in the libertarian ““great man” view of history for the evo- bd . 7 SANNApproved For Release 200 1108/26 "CURR OPES BOTS 7 RUBUZoos0B8H 2 STATI PE aan enees -been painted, had Shakespeare and Pi- casso not existed. But of how many ‘scientific achievements can this be claimed? One could almost say that, with — very few exceptions, it is not the men that make science, it is science that makes the men. What A does today, B orC or Dcould surely do tomorrow.” + On reading this passage, I found my- ‘self in full agreement on the general lack -of literary skills among men of science. I was surprised, however, to find an_ eminent scientist embracing historicism {the theory championed by Hegel and -Marx holding that history is determined. -by immutable forces rather than by hu- man agency) as an explanation for the lution of art. Since it had not occured to me that anyone could hold such con- tradictory, and to me obviously false, views conceming these two most im- portant domains of human creation, I -began to ask scientific friends and col- leagues whether they too, by any chance, thought there was an impor- tant qualitative difference between the achievements of art and of science, namely that the former are unique and the latter inevitable. To my even greater surprise, I found that most of them seemed to agree with Chargaff. Yes, they: Said, it is quite true that we would not have had Timon of Athens or “Les Des- moiselles d’Avignon” if Shakespeare and Picasso had not existed, but if Wat- son and Crick had not existed, we would have had the DNA double helix any- Way. Therefore, contrary to my first im- Pression, it does not seem to be all that ‘obvious that this proposition has little Philosophical or historical merit, Hence Ushall now attempt to show that there Mt ee: bt y proportion of ade- the arts and sciences in regard to the . uniqueness of their creations, Before discussing the proposition of differential uniqueness of creation it is necessary to make an explicit statement of the meaning of “art” and of “science,” ‘My understanding of these terms is based on the view that both the arts ‘and. the sciences are activities that en- deavor to discover and cormmunicate truths about the world. The domain to which the artist addresses himself is the inner, subjective world of the emotions. Artistic statements therefore pertain mainly to relations between private events of affective significance. The do- main of the scientist, in contrast, is the ' Outer, objective world of physical phe- nomena. Scientific statements therefore pertain mainly to relations between or among public events, Thus the transmis- _ sion of information and the perception of meaning in that information consti- tute the central content of both the arts _ and the sciences. A creative act on the part of either an artist or a scientist would mean his formulation of a new meaningful statement about the world, an addition to the accumulated capital of what is sometimes called “our cul- tural heritage.” Let us therefore examine the proposition that only Shakespeare could have formulated the semantic structures represented by Timon, where- as people other than Watson and Crick might have made the communication represented by their paper, “A Structure for Deoxyribonucleic Acid,” published. in Nature in the spring of 1953, First, it is evident that the exact word sequence that Watson and Crick pub- lished in Nature would not have been written if the authors had not existed, any more than the exact word sequence of Timon would have been written with- 210 eh ProkouRt SPONSE FOF Relduse ZoeTICaI2E™ CIA RD PG -odEFROVEZINUBOTSTS! (| | a) ed | PRESENT VIEW of the chemical structure of DNA sees the mole. eale as a Jong chain in which the four nucleotide bases can be are ,; ranged in any arbitrary order. Although the 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). fabulous monkey typists complete their random work at the Eritish Museum... And so both creations are from that point of view unique. We are not really concerned, however, with the exact word sequence. We are concemed with . the conterit. Thus we admit that people ’ other than Watson and Crick would. eventually have described a satisfactory molecular structure for DNA. But then the character of Timon and the story of . his trials and tribulations not only might have been written without Shakespeare but also were written without him. Shakespeare merely reworked the story - _ Of Timon he had read in William Paint- . _er’s collection of classic tales, The Palace of Pleasure, published 40 years earlier, and Painter in tum had used as his sources Plutarch and Lucian. But then we do not really care about Timon’s . story; what counts are the deep insights into human emotions that Shakespeare provides in his play. He shows us here how a man may make his response to the injuries of Jife, how he may tum from lighthearted benevolence to pas- sionate hatred toward his fellow men. Can one be sure, however, that Timon is unique from this bare-bones stand- point of the work’s artistic essence? No, because who is to say that if Shake- speare had not existed no other drama- -tist would have provided for us the same insights? Another dramatist would surely have used an entirely different story (as Shakespeare himself did in his much more successful King Lear) to treat the same theme and he might have succeeded in pulling it off. The reason no, one seems to have done it since is that Shakespeare had already done it in 1607, just as no one discovered the structure of DNA after Watson and Crick had already discovered it in 1953. 89 a tr cc aN nl iin hem NEO G. BbA Biee ercn rt  Vi  ale ear e te My RI a NER ob Aste ela SER on wee eke
Approved For Release2001/03/26 : CIA- RDP96- 00787Rago200080054 5 oe. Ou, HYDROGEN BONDS . Serting that Timon is uniquely Shake! to. or : - - : speare’s, because no other dramatist, ale the though he might have brought us more# in| or less the same insights, would haveg - Ch done it in quite the same exquisite way| {as as Shakespeare. But here we must not§ anc shortchange Watson and Crick and take anc for granted that those other people who sel " eventually would have found the struc:§ qui ~ ture of DNA would have found it in justi ant the same way and produced the same# aw ~ revolutionary effect on contemporary bi-f| all ology. On the basis of my acquaintanceB all with the personalities then engaged ing ed; trying to uncover the structure of DNA:— ‘cee I believe that if Watson and Crick hadf oth not existed, the insights they provided} ent _ In one single package would have come@ rea out much more gradually over a period} the of many months or years. Dr, B might) wh have seen that DNA is a double-strand} Jab helix, and Dr. C might later have rec:§ sor ognized the hydrogen bonding betweer® cor the strands, Dr. D Jater yet might have for proposed, a complementary purine-py-j is . rimidine bonding, with Dr. E in a sub-§ — ste sequent paper proposing the specific® pai adenine-thymine and guanine-cytosing—’ in nucleotide pairs. Finally, we might havaf to had to wait for Dr. G to propose thes or - yeplication mechanism of DNA based ong ni¢ i. the complementary nature of the twof d . strands, All the while Drs, H, I, J, K and § the L would have been confusing the issue) apy by publishing incorrect structures andf oft proposals. Thus I fully agree with the} his judgment offered by Sir Peter Medawatt CoN in his review of The Double Helix: “The— mo great thing about [Watson and Crick’s]f sta _ discovery was its completeness, its airf the of finality. If Watson and Crick had§ the been seen groping toward an answer, iff of they had published a partly right soluzé lac tion and had been obliged ta follow icq. “m up with corrections and glosses, somef of of them made by other people; if the  cve solution had come out piecemeal instead-{ rar. of. in a blaze of understanding; then it# the would still have been a great episode in§ tha biological history; but something moref rec _ in the common run of things; something} | the splendidly well done, but not in the} gr grand romantic manner.” ; " i if fou Wy is it that so many scientists ap-f lati parently fail to see that it can bef at. said of both art and science that where-f| sin as “what A does today, B or G or DR tic could surely do tomorrow,” B or C or} vio D might nevertheless not do it as well asf net A, in the same “grand romantic man=f nal s ner.” J think a variety of reasons can be} bee Approved For Release 2001/03/26 : CIA- RDP96-00787R00020006C6G4:- fr this strange} wo myopia. The first of them is simply that} per : WATSON. CRICK MODEL of the structure of DNA, the discovery of which was announced most scientists are not familiar with the: car