Responsibility for the Double Helix

[Ernst Mayr]

One day when I was at the American Museum in New York in my office. I was an ornithologist at that time, I wasn't even an evolutionist. At least nobody knew I was but for everybody else I was an ornithologist. And one day Jim Watson's mother came to see me. And my memory is sufficiently faint, that I don't know was Jim along with her, [or] Mr. Watson. All I remember is the mother.

And the question she asked me, she said, "My son is wild about birds. Birds is the thing that he's really interested in. To what college should he go for his bird studies?" Well, listen to that, that was the question. And I said, "It would be a great mistake if he, as a beginning university student, immediately goes somewhere to study birds. He has to get a good biological education first, and then when he is ready to go to graduate school then he can pick a school where birds are the major interest, and at that time I will be glad to advise him."

Well whether it was my advice or whether they would have done it anyhow, of course, he did exactly that! He went to the University of Chicago, and later on Indiana, and as I have more or less expected when I gave my advice birds were just forgotten!

However as a joke, I always tell people that I'm the person responsible for the fact of Jim Watson discovered the double helix cause if it hadn't been for me he would have become an ornithologist.

*THIS MEMORY WAS EXTRACTED FROM A CSHL ORAL HISTORY INTERVIEW*