The Double Helix - Case Notes

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Author - John Shepherd - Summer 1998

Teaching Notes Each day I posted the assignment on the section web page as follows.

Assignment for Day 1. Read the first half of The Double Helix. (pages 7- 62). We will finish the book itself next week and then read some of the reviews of the book that follow. When we have finished this section I will ask you to write a mid-term paper that requires you to be familiar with this material, so reading it carefully now will help you in another week or so. This book has a little technical detail in it, but it is mostly a personal narrative. Watson is both sarcastic and witty, and if you don't find any chuckles as you read, you are missing a lot of what's there.

As you start to read, pay close attention to the people and their personalities. What would they have been like if you had lunch or dinner with them? I want you to be able to put a human face on all the abstract ideas we have been talking about. The main characters are:

Day 1 Class meeting: At the start of class, I asked them to write for about 5 minutes on the characteristics of the stereotypical scientist. Then I asked them to pick one of the people from the list above and compare the person to their stereotype.

I projected pictures of each person from their book and had them talk about the peoples personalities. We tried to imagine how things would have worked if we switched people around: Crick-Wilkins, Watson-Wilkins, etc. This seemed to elicit imaginative comments that captured the essentials of each personality.

Assignment for Day 2. Finish reading The Double Helix (pp 63-131). Then look back over the whole book. What were the steps that led them to their final result? How was the discovery made? Who made it? Let's accept the following as what Watson and Crick knew as they started this work in earnest:

What were the 5 most important steps ("piece of the puzzle", ideas, evidence, etc.) that revealed the structural form of the molecule. To focus your effort, make a list like that in the following table (to turn in). I started you off by listing what I thought was the last puzzle piece to be put in place:

  "Puzzle Piece" How it was discovered? / Who did it?

1

    

2

    

3

    

4

    

5

 Complementary Base Pairing (A-T, C-G)  

Day 2 Class meeting: Student groups were asked to compare the puzzle piece lists they prepared, to explain their lists to one another, and to reach a consensus on a group list. There were a number of technical questions in the groups. After about half an hour, I started a consensus list on the board, which we worked on for the rest of the class meeting. I thought the directions were quite clear on which things they should take for granted, but they had many questions. This day forced them to try to reconstruct the 'cognitive history' that led to the double helix discovery. They were not at all clear on how the pieces fit together. This could be stretched into another class by assigning more detailed work on particular chapters by the groups.

Assignment for Day 3. Ziman and our class discussions have treated science a single procedure that uses math, metaphors, logical tests, some empirical observations to increase our understanding of some problem. The Double Helix story makes it clear that this method is not a monolith, but may be practiced quite differently by different people. In this class meeting, I want us to contrast the science done by the key players in the Double Helix story.

Although they are all working on the same problem, do they differ significantly in their approaches? If so, how? Is everyone’s work equally consensible? Are their approaches phenomenological? Metaphor-building? Deductive? Do they approach the problem of consensus-building similarly? Do they test the validity of their ideas in the same way?

As preparation for that discussion, write a paragraph each about three of the following people. The paragraphs need not be long, but each should try to answer some of these questions using specific examples of the person’s work. I list below a few pages for each person that will start you looking for examples. You may well find better ones elsewhere in the book.

Day 2 Class meeting: Student exercise was meant to foreshadow the mid-term writing assignment, which was not yet posted for them to see. In class, I tried to contrast the roles of theoreticians and experimentalists, but this was only partly successful. The students tended to see things in very simplistic terms: Wilkins a dolt; Franklin a witch; Watson a data thief, etc. Doing this again, I would try something new here. The Hatton & Plouffe essay on theoreticians and experimentalists could be inserted before this assignment with good effect.

Assignment for Day 3. Each person is assigned one or two reviews. Each review is itself briefly described in Gunther Stent’s Review of Reviews, which should reinforce the main points of the reading. Come to class ready with an oral synopsis of your reading and your own interpretation of both the review and the book itself.

Day 3 Class meeting: I assigned readings so that each of the members of the group had a different reading assignment. At the start of class, I pointed this out to the groups and asked each person to talk about the review of TDH he/she had read. As they talked about the reviews, they were supposed to compare the often sharply different perspectives. The group was also supposed to compare their own opinions to those of the reviewers.

Each of the reviews contains different insights and required differing levels of reader sophistication so I chose the readers carefully, doubling up on weak students. Stent's Review of Reviews gives a brief synopsis of each review that will give you a quick overview.

I thought this was going to be a terrific class but turned out to be a real bomb. I thought the initial survey of the reviews would take about half the class, but two groups 'finished' discussing their collective 50 pages of reading in about 10 minutes! I spent the rest of the hour going from group to group raising some of the many questions they had ignored. I think this assignment might work well with another group of students.

 

Writing Assignment. I used this case for a midterm paper. Instructions for the students are here.