THE RACE FOR THE DOUBLE HELIX
A film review by Mark R. Leeper
Copyright 1987 Mark R. Leeper
Capsule review: Made-for-TV BBC film gives a more
rounded view than does Watson's book THE DOUBLE HELIX. A
very fine film with a lot to say about the discipline of
science research.
For years the issue has been hotly contested. How good is British television really? I think everyone agrees that some of the best things on American television came from Britain. It is hard to beat programs like I, CLAUDIUS, but they are just a few occasional good programs. Certainly British television has its share of stupid situation comedies that do not get seen over here. Well, it seems to me that their good programs are so good that their bad television shows can easily be overlooked.
Around the middle of September I start thinking back on what was the best film I have seen the previous summer. I had pretty well determined it was to be De Palma's UNTOUCHABLES this year when just under the wire I saw something better. And it was a made-for-TV film, made by the BBC for British television. The film ran on the Arts and Entertainment cable station and was called THE RACE FOR THE DOUBLE HELIX. It featured superb acting by Jeff Goldblum as James D. Watson and Tim Piggot-Smith as Francis Crick. Watson and Crick are the two unconventional scientists who worked out the structure of DNA.
The film is about many things. Among other things, it is about a conflict between two approaches to science. You can go for the gold, or glory in the truth and doing things the right way. The first approach is personified by Goldblum's Watson, a boorish Yank who is a duomaniac. His goals are to get a girl and a Nobel Prize. Anything in life that does not further his attempts at one goal or the other is not to be tolerated. Espousing the other point of view is Rosalinda Franklin, to whom science is a turn-the-crank operation of putting enough work into your goal, going from square one to square two, to square three,...until you have achieved your goal without once making an intuitive leap. The film is about the politics of science and the viewer comes away with an education in how those politics work as well as one of how the structure of DNA was determined. It is the story of how three men won a Nobel Prize based greatly on the work of one woman who neither got a piece of the prize nor, because she was a woman, was she even allowed to join the men in the lounge of the building where they worked.
THE RACE FOR THE DOUBLE HELIX is a powerful, excellent film. If this sort of thing gets shown often on the BBC, I may pack my bag. Rate it a +3 on the -4 to +4 scale.
Mark R. Leeper
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