Girls, Genes, and Gamow.

WATSON, James D.

$175.00

Item Number: 122699

New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2002.

First edition of the “essential coda to The Double Helix” (The Boston Globe). Octavo, original half cloth. Signed by James Watson on the title page. Fine in a fine dust jacket. Jacket design by Gabriele Wilson.

In the years following his and Francis Crick’s towering discovery of DNA, James Watson was obsessed with finding two things: RNA and a wife. Genes, Girls, and Gamow is the marvelous chronicle of those pursuits. Watson effortlessly glides between his heartbreaking and sometimes hilarious debacles in the field of love and his heady inquiries in the field of science. He also reflects with touching candor on some of science’s other titans, from fellow Nobelists Linus Pauling and the incorrigible Richard Feynman to Russian physicist George Gamow, who loved whiskey, limericks, and card tricks as much as he did molecules and genes. “A priceless glimpse into the intellectual circle that nurtured [Watson’s] revolutionary paradigm" (The New York Times Book Review).