The New Yorker cartoon seemed to say it all. In front of a miserable Neanderthal, his head sunk low, were two watching contemporaries. ‘So he invented fire and the wheel,’ they mused, 'but what has he done since?’ James Watson was only 25 when, with Francis Crick, these two men determined the structure of DNA. But neither man, since their astonishing leap to fame in 1953, has sunk like the Neanderthal. For one thing they have each written a biography telling of their lives, namely Crick’s What Mad Pursuit? And Watson’s The Double Helix.

It is easy to suspect that Watson’s book did more to stimulate enthusiasm for science in general, and for molecular biology in particular, than any other work. It was fun, enlightening, educational, splendidly cocky, and extremely widely read. Small wonder, therefore, that this latest Watson volume is all of those things, plus some wisdom generated from a more elderly individual (as he is now in his 70s).

Neither Watson nor Crick rested on their laurels. Francis Crick persevered with research, ‘changing the face of science’ according to this new book’s delightful foreword by Walter Gratzer, while James Watson ‘took on the unlikely role of statesman’. It was unlikely partly because, to quote Gratzer yet again, Watson ‘was generally regarded as too bright to be sound’. In 1968 he became director of the ‘decaying’ Cold Spring Harbour Laboratory, quickly turning it into ‘one of the world’s pre-eminent centers of molecular genetics and cancer research’. He was also one of those who brought the human genome project into existence. By no means has he been that Neanderthal.

A Passion for DNA is most correctly titled. That emotion has never dimmed, and runs throughout the varied contents of this book, its essays, its introductions to Cold Spring Harbour’s annual reports, its lectures, and magazine articles. Best of all, in my opinion, is his 4-page piece on ‘Succeeding in Science’. It gives, here much abbreviated, his five rules of thumb:

1. Avoid dumb people; turn to those brighter than yourself.

2. Be prepared to get into deep trouble.

3. Have someone up your sleeve who will save you ‘when you find yourself in deep shit’.

4. Never do anything that bores you.

5. If you can’t stand being with your real peers, get out of science.

I suppose he cannot get a Nobel prize for literature (to go with his other one) but I found this latest volume just as stimulating, as much fun, and as well-written as was The Double Helix, this first published over 30 years ago and still as good a read as ever.

Anthony Smith