Speaking Out About Competition

Abstract

Popularisation is didactic, in two senses, one obvious, the other more subtle and oblique. On one level it is about the translation of complex and esoteric ideas into the terms of everyday life. On another, it is concerned with the diffusion of images of science which suggest how people might operate as scientists. This paper deals with the latter aspect of popularisation. I shall show that popularisation tends to produce accounts of the activity of science which are highly schematic and incomplete. I shall also argue that under the pressure of structural and cultural change in biology new issues and concerns can be brought into popular discourse, which transform the nature and tenor of writing for the lay public. These claims will be illustrated by reference to James Watson's The Double Helix, first published in 1968 and still in print. This book, I shall suggest, was written essentially to popularise a new style of research, to signal its appearance and to propagandise its technical superiority over the classical forms of biological enquiry. It was designed to appeal to student readers, in the hope that they might join the new discipline. Finally, it will be shown that an important effect of this publication has been to make competitive, individualistic, arrogant behaviour by scientists publically admissible and correspondingly to present the work on the double helix as a race.