Biological clout

BESIDES being the ne plus ultra of gadflies, James D. Watson -- the Nobel laureate biologist whose recent impolitic remark about the relative intelligence of Africans and inhabitants of the developed world resulted in his resignation as chancellor of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory -- is the author of one of the best science books ever written for a general audience: "The Double Helix" (1968), in which he recounts how he and Francis Crick discovered the structure of DNA, the nucleic acid of which genes are made. It is an engaging and accessible portrait of the scientific process, notwithstanding the famous eccentricity of both principals.

Watson was 25 when he did that work. Today he's just shy of 80, and in "Avoid Boring People" (a beautifully double-barreled title whose punch is pulled by the jacket design), from his near-octogenarian heights, he passes on what he can to young scientists coming up and to the rest of us as well. The chapters of this new memoir -- an earlier one, "Genes, Girls, and Gamow," was mostly about his pursuit of female company after receiving his Nobel Prize -- each has "Manners" in its title ("Manners Learned While an Undergraduate," "Manners Noticed as a Dispensable White House Adviser"). It's a strange word for him to have chosen; manners, except for bad ones, are not what Watson is known for. Each chapter is followed by a set of "Remembered lessons," which he calls "rules of conduct that in retrospect figured decisively in turning so many of my childhood dreams into reality."

"Oh, nuts! I'm going to be bored after all," you're thinking. Not a bit! Particularly entertaining are Watson's recollections of what it was like to go in 1956 from the vanguard of molecular biology at Cambridge University to that other Cambridge, the one on this side of the Atlantic, where what he calls "organismal biologists" of a naturalist bent ran the Harvard biology department and refused to give the new science its due -- at least as Watson saw it. There he had difficulty achieving tenure, agonized over annual raises, was bored silly by such faculty stars as Harry Levin and Willard V.O. Quine and mourned the absence of his peers -- including Purdue geneticist Seymour Benzer, who turned down an offer from Harvard because, Watson surmises, "[l]ife was too short to share a department with so many prima donnas whose meager accomplishments scarcely justified even the status of has-been." Nor was Watson impressed by Harvard's president, Nathan Pusey, wondering "whether any conversational gambit could possibly elicit from him an animated response." Sample remembered lessons: "Be prepared to resign over inadequate [laboratory] space," and "Channel rage through intermediaries."