The Double Helix
Watson's astonishingly candid account of discovering DNA's structure reads like a thriller: competitive, gossipy, occasionally maddening in its treatment of Rosalind Franklin, but electrifying in its portrait of science as a human, hungry, imperfect enterprise. No other book captures the actual texture of doing science at its highest pitch.
Watson's charm and his arrogance are the same substance, and Rosalind Franklin pays for both: condescended to as Rosy, graded on her looks, her data used without her knowledge, then half-apologized to in an epilogue she did not live to read. Crick and Wilkins both objected to the manuscript. Read it as evidence, in every sense, rather than as history.
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
