The Secret of Life - 28 February 2003

I suppose that when the morning newspaper rustles outside the door, or in my case flops like a tired child on my bed, everybody has a favourite page or section to turn to.

With me, Monday and then Thursday through Sunday, it's the sports section, for the golf scores - the professional tour is now well under way.

Same with the pro-tennis tour, which is also off and smashing.

Wednesday is a dead day for escapism, so I start on page one of the fat news section and I settle down early and glumly to my daily fare of Iraq, the White House, the United Nations, al-Qaeda and the latest lectures on the tube - there are two or three a day - about the separate lethal forms of biochemical agents we may expect to die from tomorrow or next week or next year.

On the other hand there is Tuesday when I quickly slide out my favourite section of the week - the New York Times's regular weekly science section.

Last Tuesday was one in a thousand. To be exact - one in 2,600.

For the whole section was devoted to celebrating one event in February 1953: the slouching into a dingy pub in Cambridge (England, I should remind Harvard men) of two young research students - an American of 25 and a 37-year-old Englishman, both of them I'm looking at dressed in the undergraduate gear of the time, and oddly of my time, which must look weird to college boys today: soft white shirt, dark tie, pullover, rumply tweed jacket and dark flannels.

They walked in, somebody said, on a remarkable high and cockily announced "What do you know, chaps, we have discovered the secret of life!"

They had discovered the chemical structure of deoxyribonucleic acid - slangily known as DNA.

There's no report I've seen of the response of the luncheon crowd at the old Eagle - the pub - but within a month the world's press and the tele had proclaimed, falsely, that Watson and Crick had "discovered" DNA.

Surely you'll remember - I don't - the enormous fuss made in 1870 at a beer garden in Tubingen when deoxyribonucleic acid had been discovered by a chemistry student with a name by now known to you all - none other than Friedrich Miescher.

It was rediscovered again in 1909 by a 40-year-old Russian-American with the mellifluous name of Phoebus Theodore Levene.

He thought it had something to do with animal and human heredity. He was very warm.

But as I've just said - and the New York Times was saying to the extent last Tuesday of 14 articles, 25,000 words in all - what Watson and Crick did. Well what did they do?

Well, mmm - let's look at their one-page article about it in the English magazine Nature.

It began with remarkable modesty: We wish to suggest a structure for the salt of deoxyribonucleic acid which may be of considerable biological interest.

Their model had a basic structure, that of a double helix - like a long, winding, tubular staircase.

And it showed - to put it as crudely as possible - how the genetic material in animal and human cells can duplicate itself. Exclamation point.

"Holy Moses!" Albert Einstein is said to have exclaimed.

"Some day we'll be able to make humans," is what the tabloids said.

But I do remember at the time - February 1953 - I was hosting a television show - the first 90-minute show here, certainly the most ambitious show that's attempted up till then.

We tried every week to have a melange - a mixture - of music, drama, science, politics, history, ballet - everything from Beethoven's or Leonardo's notebooks to the making of the Constitution and the physics of the golf swing.

Well DNA seemed right up our alley. We made contacts at Princeton, MIT, all over, and we discovered within a week that the whole subject - the mightiness of the Watson-Crick achievement - was so hideously complex and incomprehensible to laymen - that's to say to us, to you, to me, as it still is - that even thinking of it as a television feature was immediately to be abandoned. And it was.

So I will end this instructive part of the sermon by saying that all you know about DNA is all you're likely to learn from this quarter.

But I leave the monstrous topic with a cheering word.

One of the New York Times pieces is by an eminent woman science reporter, Natalie Angier, who has a wicked touch with subjects profound and - what's the highbrow word? - arcane.

And she gives hope and reassurance to abysmal ignorance. Her piece might have been printed under the heading "Don't Get Too Excited" Department.

She has this relieving little paragraph.

"With all the breathless talk of human DNA as a grand epic written in three billion runes, the scientists complain that an essential point has been forgotten - DNA on its own does nothing, it can't make eyes blue, livers bilious or brains bulging, it holds bare bones information, suggestions really, for the construction of the proteins of which all life forms are built. But that's it. DNA can't read these instructions, it can't divide, it can't keep itself clean or sit up properly. Proteins that surround it do all those tasks. DNA is helpless and speechless."

So we may all wonder what all the fuss is about.

As my grandmother said: "How can they know all this about Napoleon? He's been dead more than a hundred years."

However, there was the same day, last Tuesday, on the front page of the same paper, The New York Times, the result of a new medical study, a clinical trial, that is good news for all of us, especially for people in middle age or old age, but not excluding even young people who take long airplane flights, don't take a walk ever, but stay put for too many hours in a tight seat, napping, talking, eating, drinking, dosing and may find later that they have a pain in the shin or thigh and are diagnosed with what heart doctors call "Economy class syndrome".

Technically, a deep vein thrombosis or blood clot from which in the United States alone, between a quarter and half a million people suffer and 150,000 die every year.

The piece begins with the regular treatment of people who have had a clot but the breakthrough - the reason why it's a four-column front page piece - is that there is a now a treatment for people who've never had a clot but have a condition - for instance, heart disease or high pressure - that disposes them to have blood clots.

The study was to be published next month but the New England Journal of Medicine said the trial had produced such a dramatic and favourable result for potential clotters that they put it at once on the internet.

The study began with just over 500 patients at 52 hospitals in the United States, Canada and Switzerland.

Two hundred and fifty of them were put on the best known anti-clotting drug - warfarin.

The other 250, the so-called control group, of course were put on a useless, harmless placebo but need I say they didn't know it.

The drug warfarin was known about, invented, in the 1950s - so what's with the four-column headline hailing a novelty?

The usual treatment for clotters has been to put them on a high dose of warfarin for from three to six months and then take them off because the drug is unfortunately very good at producing the opposite - namely excessive bleeding.

The great new news is that after six months of the usual treatment they were put on very low doses of the drug and also tried out on separate exercise with people who'd had no clot and they were watched from two years to four years.

The result was that the risk of a second clot was cut by 64%.

An officer of the National Heart Institute declared: "For the first time we have a safe and effective long-term treatment for everybody at risk of blood clotting."

The idea of trying a continuous, very low dose of warfarin occurred four years ago to the doctor who ran the study and he is Dr Paul Ridker, director of cardiovascular disease prevention at Boston's famous Brigham and Women's Hospital, which has, for 60 years, certainly been a notable pioneer - from 1942, the treatment of third degree burns after a frightful Boston nightclub fire, to the very first kidney transplant, way back in the 1950s.

Now the drug warfarin of course has a brand name but, observing the code I've adhered to for all my journalistic life, brand names may never be mentioned.

The old Guardian wouldn't let me use Vaseline - petroleum jelly.

And once when I wrote about a parson who'd carried a Thermos while watching a cricket match in chilly weather, the editor changed it to vacuumatic container - which not even the Guardian readers had any idea what that might be!

But warfarin - the last time I talked, lectured, to a London medical society somehow this drug came up and I remarked how odd it was that it should be the American doctors who used the brand name and the British who used warfarin.

A doctor got up and he said with a slight slap at the old US: "Well we prefer not to use advertised names but stick to the generics."

"Still," I said, "warfarin is not a chemical name and I must say I think it's gallant of you to honour two doctors I knew who 50 or more years ago, as research students at Wisconsin University, invented the drug - and so you use their invented word for Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation at the Research Institute - warfarin!"

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