It is not unusual in accounts of the discovery of the double helix to encounter highly critical comments on the behaviour of individuals involved and this book is no exception. However judgements are well supported by extensive references with the 387 pages of text being followed by 60 pages containing some 1500 notes identifying sources – a remarkable number for a book aimed at a general audience. In this context it is worth quoting from the author’s Last Words, ‘With such a rich and diverse cast, there are plenty of candidates who could round off the story in style. My own choice is a man who hovered on the periphery of the action, but who determined the course of this particular stretch of history: John Randall. Without him, the structure of the double helix would still have been solved – but Francis Crick, JimWatson, MauriceWilkins and Rosalind Franklin would probably have played no part in that discovery’. Randall continued to embrace challenges: in the early 1960s he secured generous support from the Medical Research Council and the Welcome Trust to establish a Department of Biophysics in a handsomely restored 5-storey building in Covent Garden and when he retired to Edinburgh University in 1970 he assembled a group undertaking novel studies of protein structure by neutron scattering at the Institut Laue-Langevin in Grenoble.

中文翻译：

---

氢键。一生的纽带

在描述双螺旋的发现时，遇到对所涉及个人行为的高度批判性评论并不罕见，本书也不例外。然而，大量参考文献很好地支持了判断，其中 387 页的文本随后是 60 页，其中包含大约 1500 个识别来源的注释——对于面向普通读者的一本书来说，这是一个了不起的数字。在这种情况下，值得引用作者的遗言，“凭借如此丰富多样的演员阵容，有很多候选人可以在风格上完善这个故事。我自己的选择是一个徘徊在行动边缘的人，但他决定了这段特定历史的进程：约翰兰德尔。没有他，双螺旋的结构仍然可以解决——但是弗朗西斯·克里克、吉姆·沃森、MauriceWilkins 和 Rosalind Franklin 可能不会参与这一发现”。兰德尔继续迎接挑战：在 1960 年代初期，他获得了医学研究委员会和欢迎信托基金的慷慨支持，在考文特花园一座经过精心修复的 5 层楼建筑中建立了生物物理学系，并于 1970 年退休到爱丁堡大学组建了一个小组，在格勒诺布尔的劳厄-朗之万研究所通过中子散射对蛋白质结构进行新的研究。