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The Double Helix : A Personal Account of the Discovery of the Structure of DNA is an autobiographical account of the discovery of the double helix structure of DNA written by James D. Watson and published in 1968. It was and remains a controversial account. Though it was originally slated to be published by Harvard University Press, Watson's home university dropped the arrangement after protestations from Francis Crick and Maurice Wilkins,[1] co-discoverers of the structure of DNA, and it was published instead by Atheneum in the USA and Weidenfeld and Nicholson in the UK. It has been criticized as being excessively sexist towards Rosalind Franklin, another participant in the discovery, who was deceased by the time Watson's book was written.
The intimate first-person account of scientific discovery was unusual for its time. The book has been hailed as a highly personal view of scientific work, with its author seemingly caring only about the glory of priority and willing to appropriate data from others surreptitiously in order to obtain it.
A 1980 Norton Critical Edition of The Double Helix edited by Gunther Stent, analyzed the events surrounding its initial publication. It presents a selection of both positive and negative reviews of the book, by such figures as Philip Morrison, Richard Lewontin, Alex Comfort, Jacob Bronowski, and more in-depth analyses by Peter Medawar, Robert K. Merton, and Andre Lwoff. Erwin Chargaff declined permission to reprint his unsympathetic review from the March 29, 1968 issue of Science, but letters in response from Max Perutz, Maurice Wilkins, and Watson are printed. Also included are retrospectives from a 1974 edition of Nature written by Francis Crick and Linus Pauling, and an analysis of Franklin's work by her student Aaron Klug. The Norton edition concludes with the 1953 papers on DNA structure as published in Nature.
The events described in the book were dramatized in a BBC television program called Life Story (known as The Race for the Double Helix in the U.S.).
In 1998, the Modern Library placed The Double Helix at number 7 on its list of the 20th century's best works of non-fiction.[citation needed]. In 2012, The Double Helix was named as one of the 88 "Books That Shaped America" by the Library of Congress
