Watson and Crick

The fact that James Watson and Francis Crick were able to discover the structure of DNA is, in retrospect, somewhat shocking. By the early 1950s, it had become clear that the riddle of DNA's structure would be solved through X-ray crystallography, while Watson admits in the fourth chapter of The Double Helix that "I knew nothing about the X-ray diffraction techniques that dominated structural analysis" (Watson 31). Moreover, some of the best scientists who did have a knowledge of X-ray crystallography -- like Linus Pauling in America and Rosalind Franklin in the UK -- were consciously working on the structure of DNA at the same time that Watson and Crick got involved. Additionally, Watson was extraordinarily young at the time of the discovery. Although Crick was "thirty-five, yet almost totally unknown" at the time of their collaboration (Watson 7) but Watson was born in 1928 and in...
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