WATSON, JAMES

Inscribed first edition autobiographical account of the discovery of the double-helix structure of DNA. 

• James D. Watson (American).
• Fourth printing, published two months after the first.
• New York: Athenaeum, [July] 1968.
• xvi, 226, [12] pp. 1 vols.
• 8vo.
• Inscribed on the first blank: "For Violet Gale, With much appreciation for her advice to John Edsall. From Jim Watson." 
• Original blue cloth, publisher's dust jacket.
• Morocco backed clamshell box by Asprey.

Both Gale and Edsall were colleagues of Watson's at Harvard University's Biological Laboratories. About Violet Gale we find precious little aside from a letter she wrote Watson in April 1968, congratulating him on his marriage and asking for an inscribed copy of this book for her daughter; it's plausible that Watson would have also sent her this copy at the same time. The protein biologist John Tilerston Edsall (1902-2002), Watson's venerated senior colleague, played an important role in making Harvard Labs a welcome environment to the kind of research that Watson was undertaking, and which would culminate in his co-discovery of the structure of DNA.