CRICK AND WATSON “WERE FOR 20TH-CENTURY BIOLOGY WHAT DARWIN AND HIS CIRCLE WERE FOR THE 19TH”: EXCEEDINGLY SCARCE FIRST PUBLICATION OF THEIR PAPER, THE STRUCTURE OF DNA—“UNVEILING THE DOUBLE HELIX” AT THE JUNE 1953 COLD SPRING HARBOR SYMPOSIA

WATSON, J[ames] D.; CRICK, F[rancis] H.C. The Structure of DNA. IN: Cold Spring Harbor Symposia on Quantitative Biology. Volume XVIII, pp. 123-131. Cold Spring Harbor, L.I., New York: Biological Laboratory, 1953. Tall quarto, contemporary full burgundy cloth.

First edition of Volume XVIII of the Cold Spring Harbor Symposia containing the first publication of Crick and Watson’s paper, The Structure of DNA, delivered June 1953 in what Watson later described as the “unveiling the double helix,” in which they “describe a structure for DNA which… allows us to propose, for the first time, a detailed hypothesis on the atomic level for the reproduction of genetic material.” Preceded only by the same year’s articles in Nature containing only “a preliminary account of some of these data.”

This very scarce volume contains the first publication of Watson and Crick's revolutionary paper, The Structure of DNA (123-131), delivered at the June 1953 Cold Harbor Symposium on Viruses. In their opening paragraph Watson and Crick write: "In this paper we shall describe a structure for DNA which… allows us to propose, for the first time, a detailed hypothesis on the atomic level for the self-reproduction of genetic material." This Volume was issued "as soon as possible after the Symposium meeting. As part of this effort, the printer's proofs of all articles in this volume were handled in our editorial office, and no proofs were sent to the authors." In addition, as Watson and Crick note in their paper, only a "preliminary account" with some of the data in this paper appearing in "A structure for desoxyribose nucleic acids (Nature 171:737-738) and "Genetical implications of the structure of desoxyribose nucleic acid" (Nature 167:759-760).

Watson later recalled the experience of "unveiling the double helix: [in] my lecture at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, June 1953" by noting: "I was offered, at the last minute, an invitation to speak. To this intellectually high-powered meeting I brought a three-dimensional model built in the Cavendish [Laboratory]… In the audience was Seymour Benzer… He immediately understood what our breakthrough meant for his studies of mutations in viruses… The response of the Hungarian physicist Leo Szilard to my Cold Spring Harbor talk on the double helix was less academic. His question was, 'Can you patent it?'… But then as now patents were given only for useful inventions and at the time no once could conceive of a practical use for DNA." To Watson, their "discovery put an end to a debate as old as the human species: Does life have some magical mystical essence?… Is there something divine at the heart of a cell that brings it to life? The double helix answered that question with a definitive No… Contained in the molecule's graceful curves was the key to molecular biology, a new science whose progress over the subsequent 50 years has been astounding" (Watson and Berry, DNA, 57-58, xii-xiii).

Crick and Watson "were for 20th-century biology what Darwin and his circle were for the 19th… both received accolades for their pioneering work, culminating in the Nobel prize for physiology or medicine in 1962, awarded jointly to Crick, Watson and Maurice Wilkins" (ODNB). Watson was later named head of the Human Genome Project at NIH before becoming director and president of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, and Crick, who became part of the Salk Institute for Biological Studies, pursued research on the relationship between DNA and proteins. Contains diagrams by Odile Crick, and images of the x-ray photographs of the A and B structures of DNA respectively made by Maurice Wilkins, and Rosalind Franklin and Raymond Gosling. Accompanied by two documents of provenance. The first is a laid-in one-page July 11, 2005 unsigned typed letter from Dr. Kevin J. Fraser to Dr. Laurence E. Crofutt. Dr. Fraser, a previous owner of this volume, is writing Dr. Crofutt, the earlier owner (whose owner inkstamps appear herein). Dr. Fraser writes in part: "I would be very interested to have your recollections of this meeting and Jim Watson's presentation." Dr. Crofutt, in the laid-in one-page July 19, 2005 email, replies, recalling in part: "At the time I had been working on rickettsiae, not viruses, so… most of the discussion was over my head. Also, as a young graduate student I was impressed with the assortment of Nobel laureates and other famous personages, and as Jim had been a classmate of mine at Indiana in 1949-50, I would have paid much less attention to him. I might also add that as a 'starving' graduate student, I could not afford the costs of the symposium, so was working as a busboy."

A fine copy in original cloth.