Open Sources

Linux creator Linus Torvalds reports that the name “Linus” was chosen for him because of his parents’ admiration for Nobel laureate Linus Pauling. Pauling was the rarest of men: a scientist who won the Nobel Prize not once, but twice. We find a cautionary tale for the Open Source community in the story of Pauling’s foundational work that made possible the discovery of the structure of DNA.

The actual discovery was made Francis Crick and James Watson, and is famously chronicled in Watson’s book The Double Helix. Watson’s book is a remarkably frank account of the way science is actually done. He recounts not just the brilliance and insight, but the politics, the competition, and the luck. The quest for the secret of DNA became a fierce competition between, among others, Watson and Crick’s lab in Cambridge, and Pauling’s lab at Cal Tech.

Watson describes with obvious unease the way in which Pauling came to know that Watson and Crick had solved the mystery, and created a model of DNA’s helical structure. The story here centers on Max Delbruk, a mutual friend who traveled between Cambridge and Cal Tech. While sympathetic to Watson and Crick’s desire to keep the discovery secret until all results could be confirmed, Delbruk’s allegiance ultimately was to science itself. In this passage, Watson describes how he learned that Pauling had heard the news: