“WATSON AND CRICK’S THEORY OF VIRUS STRUCTURE PROVED CORRECT”: EXCEEDINGLY SCARCE FIRST EDITION OF VIRUS STRUCTURE, 1957, SIGNED BY BOTH JAMES WATSON AND FRANCIS CRICK

CRICK, F[rancis] H. C. and WATSON, J[ames] D. Virus Structure: General Principles. IN: Ciba Foundation Symposium on the Nature of Viruses, pp. 5-18. London: J. & A. Churchill, 1957. Octavo, original green cloth, original dust jacket. Housed in a custom clamshell box. $18,000.

First edition of Watson and Crick’s Virus Structure, signed by both Watson and Crick on the first page of their article. Presented as the first paper at the prestigious 1956 Ciba Foundation symposium in London and the first paper in this collection, this seminal work—their “last direct collaboration” (Ridley)—revealed Watson and Crick’s theory of virus structure that ultimately “proved correct, crucial productive for virologists: its great success reinforced… the comparison of virus with microsome structure” (Judson, 316).

Following their famous announcement of the double helical structure of DNA in 1953, this work on viruses "would be the last direct collaboration between Crick and Watson." Arriving in Cambridge in June 1955, Watson had become "intrigued by the similar size and structure of viruses and microsomes: small round objects in cells. Microsomes seemed to contain both protein and RNA, so perhaps they had something to do with the decoding machinery and viruses would illuminate it. Before he arrived, Watson had written" to Crick and the two worked together in the same lab (Ridley, 92-3). In March 1956, at a three-day symposium organized by the Ciba Foundation, "Crick presented, as the first paper on the first day, the general principles of virus structure that he and Watson had worked out in the previous six months. Their argument was original and presumptuously elementary. Viruses were small… They appeared in the simplest shapes—either rods, like tobacco-mosaic virus, or spheres. Viruses contain a severely restricted amount of nucleic acid. Indeed, the number of nucleotides they possessed, in every case for which this is estimated, was a small fraction of the number of amino acids in their protein. With a triplet code, not overlapping, 'an RNA chain of… 6,000 bases… can code for a polypeptide chain (or chains) of total length 2,000 amino acids,' Crick said. 'To form a protein coat, however, we need at least 10 times as much as this, and probably 20 or 30 times as much.' In sum: the information required to synthesize the virus protein is contained in the RNA. As there is only a limited amount of RNA it can only carry a limited amount of information. Thus the protein molecules of the virus can only be of limited size. Rough numerical estimates show that this amount, used once, is not enough to produce a shell to cover the RNA. Thus the coat must be built up of identical subunits… The paper suggested in a sentence that microsomes might also be made up of identical protein subunits. But, they said, 'In any case, since microsomes contain only a limited amount of RNA, we would predict, by an extension of our first argument, that no very large protein molecule will be found that is not an aggregate… so Watson and Crick imagined that, structurally, the microsome, like the virus, was a shell of protein containing a highly specific packet of RNA… Watson and Crick's theory of virus structure proved correct, crucial, productive for virologists: its great success reinforced—not logically by psychologically—the comparison of virus with microsome structure" (Judson, Eighth Day of Creation, 315-6). Crick and Watson also contributed to the extensive Discussion section following Virus Structure, along with similar Discussions following eight additional articles by fellow scientists herein;Watson also contributed solely to two further Discussions, as did Crick. With 13 full-page photographic illustrations and numerous in-text graphs and charts. Owner signature.

A fine copy, scarce signed.