Hairy Science

Who knew that scientists worry so much about their hair? After reading through several books of scientific theory, last week I finally took a poke at James D. Watson's The Double Helix. Admittedly, it wasn't a book on my science-reading list that I was looking particular forward to. I hate biology, after all, and microbiology all the more. Oh, I understand it's usefulness, and I'm glad someone likes it and wants to study it so that he or she can tell me what's wrong with me and fix me up and all, but it needn't be me. I'll be down at the record store, pouring through vinyl, thank you (and I don't even own a record player--but at least the covers are interesting).

The Double Helix turned out to be a hoot, a sort of celebrity tell-all autobiography, only with high-minded scientists in the mix. You have a researcher afraid of his assistant, an assistant who threatens her boss and anyone else, an annoying heavy talker, and amid all of them an American who sort of just stumbles into genius--or so he makes it seem toward the beginning. Watson does want to study anything he doesn't like or understand, so he's taking the easiest road possible, and ends up finding DNA.

In the midst of this, however, he obsesses on his hair. He's an American, after all, among the Brits, and his hair is way too short to fit in. He lets it grow out to garner esteem in the eyes of his colleagues, and along with that, a beard, which others find atrocious and which he later wins accolades for shaving off. And then, to end it all, Nobel Prize in hand, he walks out onto the St. Germain des Pres to stare at the pretty long-haired girls walking by. He's too old for them now, he realizes--all of twenty-five. Alas, the tragedy of winning prizes--to be cast aside by beauteous hair.