What is the setting of The Double Helix?

The Double Helix is set primarily in England in the early 1950s. As Watson notes in the preface, he wants his book "to catch the atmosphere of the early postwar years in England," depicting the public's eagerness to rebuild spirits, as well as buildings, in the aftermath of World War II. He accomplishes this by including such trivialities as what type of wine is enjoyed with certain dinners and conversations that take place over morning coffee or lunches with gooseberry pie. He entwines his account of scientific data with comments on movies he sees, intellectual games he plays with members of high-society, and the fun he has playing ' 'Murder", a whodunit role-playing game, in the dark upstairs floors of friends' houses. He goes on at some length about Crick's half-French wife, Odile, who "came to Cambridge and hastened [Crick's] revolt against the stodginess of the middle classes." Watson favors Odile's cooking and spends many evenings in the Crick's home enjoying good wine and good conversation, but he is dismayed about the couple's disinterest in political issues. He attributes their neutrality toward politics to ' 'the war, whose grimness they now wished to forget."

But World War II, of course, was a conflict in which science played a greater role than at any previous time. The atomic bomb introduced a particular type of' 'grimness" that resulted in unprecedented destruction. Physicists in particular knew that, left unchecked, their research could bring about as much evil as good. So the pace quickened to learn more about, and to control better, all prospects of scientific research. This was the western European world that Watson entered in 1951 and the one he wished to capture in the setting of his book. It was a world of great hope and renewed spirits, as well as one of caution and competition brought on by the recent past.