What was the title of James Watson's 1968 best-selling book?

James Watson’s 1968 best-selling book was The Double Helix. Its full title is The Double Helix: A Personal Account of the Discovery of the Structure of DNA.

The book is Watson’s autobiographical account of the race to determine DNA’s molecular structure. It describes his collaboration with Francis Crick at Cambridge, their model-building approach, and the scientific competition involving Maurice Wilkins, Rosalind Franklin, Linus Pauling, and other researchers.

The memoir became widely read because it presented scientific discovery as a tense, personal, and competitive process rather than as a neat sequence of experiments. It also became controversial. Critics objected to Watson’s treatment of Franklin and argued that the book understated the importance of experimental data produced at King’s College London. Crick and Wilkins were among those unhappy with the account.

The title is sometimes confused with Watson’s textbook Molecular Biology of the Gene, published in 1965, or with later books about DNA. The Double Helix is specifically the 1968 memoir about the discovery of DNA’s double-helical structure.