万物简史 第586期:生命的物质(12)

（单词翻译）

Crick, twelve years older and still without a doctorate¹, was less memorably² hirsute³ and slightly more tweedy. In Watson's account he is presented as blustery, nosy⁴, cheerfully argumentative, impatient with anyone slow to share a notion, and constantly in danger of being asked to go elsewhere. Neither was formally trained in biochemistry.

克里克年长12岁，当时还没有获得博士学位。他的头发不那么蓬乱，但要稍稍硬一些。根据沃森的描述，他是一位爱说大话，吵吵闹闹，喜欢争论，急于要求别人赞成一个观点，三天两头被呼来唤去的人。他们两人都没有接受过正规的生物化学方面的训练。

Their assumption was that if you could determine the shape of a DNA⁵ molecule⁶ you would be able to see — correctly, as it turned out — how it did what it did. They hoped to achieve this, it would appear, by doing as little work as possible beyond thinking, and no more of that than was absolutely necessary. As Watson cheerfully (if a touch disingenuously) remarked in his autobiographical book The Double Helix, "It was my hope that the gene⁷ might be solved without my learning any chemistry." They weren't actually assigned to work on DNA, and at one point were ordered to stop it. Watson was ostensibly mastering the art of crystallography; Crick was supposed to be completing a thesis on the X-ray diffraction of large molecules⁸.

他们的设想是，如果你能确定DNA的分子形状，你就能明白——后来证明是正确的——它是怎样完成它所做的一切的。他们似乎希望，他们要尽可能少费力气，只要干绝对必要的工作就能达到目的。正如沃森在他的自传《双螺旋》中所兴高采烈地（也许带有某种自我夸耀的色彩）表述的那样：“我希望不学任何化学知识就能解决基因方面的问题。”实际上他们并没有被安排做DNA方面的研究工作，有一段时间还被勒令中止他们私自已经开展的工作。为了瞒天过海，沃森谎称是在进行晶体学方面的研究，而克里克则称在完成一篇用X射线衍射大型分子的论文。

Although Crick and Watson enjoy nearly all the credit in popular accounts for solving the mystery of DNA, their breakthrough was crucially dependent on experimental work done by their competitors, the results of which were obtained "fortuitously," in the tactful words of the historian Lisa Jardine. Far ahead of them, at least at the beginning, were two academics at King's College in London, Wilkins and Franklin.

在关于破译DNA的谜的普遍说法中，克里克和沃森几乎赢得了全部功劳，但是他们的突破很关键的是建立在他们的竞争对手研究成果的基础之上的，而且，用历史学家莉萨·贾丁的话来说，那些成果的获得带有“偶然性”，至少在开始阶段，伦敦大学国王学院的威尔金斯和富兰克林两位学者已经远远走在他们前面。