Edward Lewis on Watson and The Double Helix
  Edward Lewis     Biography    
Recorded: 04 Jun 2001

We read [The] Double Helix book and were pretty annoyed. He was part of the new wave that is supposed to tell it like it is, right. He went out of his way to make it appear that everything you do is sort of dishonest.

If [the difficulties that Franklin faced as a woman in science] was one of the issues, he should have written about her that way. I guess it was true [that] they were worried about competition. It [was] hard and at that time it was so radical for anyone to write about that kind of stuff. He must have alienated a lot of people. It must have alienated Crick a great deal, he was furious.

I know Crick a little bit. Those people remained very distant unless they worked at the Lab. You would never get to really know them. It’s hard to know some people.

Edward B. Lewis (1918-2004) was a renowned leader in genetics and Drosophila development research. He received his Ph.D. from the California Institute of Technology in 1942. He served as captain of the United States Army Air Force from 1942-1945 as a meteorologist and an oceanographer in the Pacific Theatre. In 1946, he joined the Caltech faculty and was appointed Professor of Biology in 1956, earning a Thomas Hunt Morgan Professorship in 1966. In 1995, Lewis won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine “for discoveries concerning the genetic control of early embryonic development” along with Christiane Nusslein-Volhard and Eric Wieschaus. Lewis is also a recipient of the Thomas Hunt Morgan Medal (1983), the Gairdner Foundation International award (1987), the Wolf Foundation prize in medicine (1989), the Rosenstiel award (1990) and the National Medal of Science (1990).