Double Helix Meets God Particle by Samantha Weinberg, June 7th 2013 In 1985 Mick Jagger duetted with

Tina Turner for Live Aid. In 1995, Robert de Ni ro and Al Pacino shared the billing in "Heat". On June 6th 2013 Peter Higgs and James Watson met at the Cheltenham Science Festival. As the first meeting betwee n two giants of science, it was pretty low-key. They shook hands outside the tow n hall, nerve centre of the festival, and chatted briefly, before Watson was swe pt off to his first event on the main stage. Sixty years ago, the young Watson and his eccentric British lab partner, Frances Crick, walked into their lab in Cambridge and, as Watson put it yesterday, "We suddenly knew we had cracked it". It, of course, being the double-helix structur e of DNA. The rest genetics, forensic science, Angelina Jolie's decision to have a preventative double mastectomy followed as surely as the night the day. But Watson, now 85, didn't stop there. At Harvard and, for the last 45 years, th e Cold Spring Harbour Laboratory on Long Island, he has continued to do exciting science (his current ambition, he said, "is to be on full salary when I'm 90 and because I'm worth it") and to be entertaining and frequently a little wicked. So me snippets from yesterday: Don't bother eating blueberries for anything other than their taste, they're not going to protect you against cancer: "Oxidants are the things that tell cancer cells to kill each other. So antioxidants stop oxidants doing their job". On Rosalind Franklin, whose work on crystallography, most people believe, was in strumental in Watson and Crick's eureka moment but who missed out on sharing the ir Nobel Prize: I should be saying: she was a sweet girl and I misunderstood her. She wasn't a s weet girl, anymore than I am a sweet man." Peter Higgs was sitting in the audience and when, an hour later, he walked onto the same stage, Watson was there to watch him. Higgs is a year younger than Wats on and, thanks to the particle named after him, just as famous. Yet there the si milarities end. As he explained the history of the search for what is also known as the God Particle, he repeatedly down-played his role in proposing its existe nce. When asked how he felt about having a particle named after him, he said: "V ery embarrassed." And when he emerged into the mid-afternoon sun, to find fans o f all ages wanting his autograph or to have their photograph taken with him, he looked a little bewildered. Yet later that evening, when Watson gave another talk with the landscape artist Charles Jencks, Higgs was again in the audience, and he was the first to congrat ulate his new friend afterwards. Samantha Weinberg is assistant editor of Intelligent Life. http://moreintelligentlife.com/blog/anonymous/higgs-and-watson