Pygmy mole crickets jump from water

to have spoken, but found at the last moment that he was too busy, and so sent Wilkins. Watson’s plan of using his sister as bait for the unattached Wilkins failed, and Wilkins rejected his overtures. Had Wilkins been more forthcoming Watson would have ended up at King’s and not in Cambridge. Wilkins had earlier tried to persuade Randall to find a place at King’s for Crick, but the Professor had demurred on the grounds that Crick talked too much. And finally there was the disastrous incompatibility of Wilkins and Rosalind Franklin, brought about by Randall. We can now see for the first time the letter that Randall wrote to Rosalind Franklin, telling her, but not Wilkins, that the DNA problem would be hers alone, that Wilkins’s able student, Gosling would be working with her, and that Wilkins would be occupying himself with other matters. Wilkins was stunned when he first saw this letter some forty years later, while gathering material for the Biographical Memoir of Randall for the Royal Society. When telling me of his discovery a day or two on, he permitted himself a little heartfelt, if restrained, profanity. Among the many rewards that this greatly enriched edition of Watson’s famous succès de scandale contains are an additional chapter (not scandalous), deleted from the original, and especially a profusion of photographs — of figures from publications, scribbled annotations in laboratory notebooks, of places with sentimental links to Watson’s chronicle, and especially of the huge cast of characters, the famous and the forgotten, at work and at play, drunk and sober. Gann and Witkowski have even added a picture of the plaque on the wall of the celebrated pub, the Eagle, commemorating the many hours that Watson and Crick drank and pondered the nature of DNA. It probably pre-dates the sign in the window of the Chinese restaurant near Columbia University, where the physicists, Yang and Lee were wont to meet to discuss the violation of mirrorimage parity. The sign proclaimed, ‘Eat here, get Nobel Prize’. This splendid volume, to conclude, is richly laden with instruction and entertainment for all, whether historian, scientist or voyeur.