The Double Helix by James Watson

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Linus Pauling's passport was denied from descending on London in Idlewood. If the State Department did not want Pauling in London because they considered him a "troublemaker." Watson and Francis were in London already at the Royal Society. There was major political tension between Linus and London because of his scientific irrationalism. It seemed to Watson something typical that Russia would do to not let a great scientist like Francis into a meeting which had nothing to do with politics. Linus was not much liked by some of the staff al Cal Tech as he was on the head of newspapers and headlines a lot as a sponsor of the World Peace Conference. He explained that he had just been in a meeting, "The Nature of Viral Multiplication" for a society of General Microbiology in Oxford. There was a speaker that was supposed to be at that conference named Luria, but two weeks before he went to London he was denied a passport.

Watson then had to talk about the American phage workers, and he depended upon Al Hershey's letter he had sent to Watson awhile before describing everything they had been doing in the phage lab. No one was interested as he spoke and read passages from Al's letter. Gunther Stent, Andre Lwoff, and Seymour Benzer were the only obvious ones who seemed interested into the information on DNA. The meeting was mostly taken up by F.C. Bawden and N.W. Pirie who were English plant virologists who had opinions against Watson's theories on TMV. Andre kept the meeting alive by giving input on divalent metals in phage multiplication. This made him agreeable to ions being important in the structure of nucleic-acid. The Royal Society Meeting gave no inkling that King's had even discussed the ions since they had...