Unraveling DNA

There was an epilogue in Ingenious Pursuits talking about James Watson's book The Double Helix (a personal account of the discovery of the structure of DNA). Jardine, the author of the book, compared the events and milieu of this discovery with some of the events described in Ingenious Pursuits.

I remembered that I had this book Unraveling DNA on my bookshelf (I bought it several years ago after finding it on MacBeth's Opinion, which has been a wonderful source for interesting science reads for all ages).

I decided to nurture this little spark of interest in the subject in order to embark on the book (because honestly, previously I had always been a bit too intimidated to delve into it). So this book is the next one I read. Reading it gave me an odd roller-coaster feeling, perhaps like riding through a double helix, because we went from sentences like this:

....the topoisomer in which a cruciform has formed turns out, as in the electrophoregram in Figure 25, to be higher than the topoisomer that has one negative superhelical turn less but carries no cruciform...

in other words, passages where I was more or less completely lost, to passages like this

Everybody knows what a knot is. We tie many knots every day. The simplest knots looks something like this....

sometimes within a page or a couple of pages. In the difficult passages, I can't complain because he does carefully explain his terms, but I certainly got some insight into the struggles of a child just learning to read. Those "big words" and concepts were very much like knots in a strand of DNA to me, bringing me to a bumpy stop until I could "repair" my attentive-reader track and move on. On the other hand, Frank-Kamenetskii writes with an avuncular good-humor -- later on the tutorial about knots, he comments editorially:

"Oh these mathematicians!" you probably think. "They will always get you into a mess." I might agree with that. I am no mathematician and often grumble in a similar fashion myself. In this particular case, however, I will beg to differ with you.

Because of these breaths of comprehension and enjoyment in between the PhD- in- genetics type passage, I actually read all but the 2 penultimate chapters of the book, and I plan to go back to those again after I do a bit more prerequisite reading:

Maybe this tutorial or this one
I also think I will go borrow The Double Helix from our country library system.

So I recommend the book. It was very worthwhile from a literary perspective -- the author's writing is precise and expressive even in translation. That is huge; it is the definition of what Charlotte Mason called a "living book". In additon, it gave me at least a sort of vague "cloud of knowing" in my mind that I didn't have before, about the subject of DNA and its ramifications.