Back in the 1980s, when I learned about Watson & Crick, I was confused. Yeah, OK, they beat others to deciphering the structure of DNA.
So what?
They didn't discover that DNA was the molecule of heredity and life's operating manual. More importantly, they didn't discover how DNA worked. Which, you know, is what we really need to know.
And on top of that, Watson and Crick's paper did not directly lead to this understanding; from their discovery in 1953, no progress was made until 1961. It was then that Marshall Nirenberg and Johannes Matthaei developed an insightful and ingenious method to determine how the genetic code actually worked - and their experiment didn't involve DNA! (It involved ribosomes and single-stranded RNA.)
And Matthaei did not win a Nobel Prize!
That Watson and Crick are the most overrated scientists of all time was made even clearer to me in What's Gotten Into You? The story was even worse than I knew: Maurice Wilkens went behind Rosalind Franklin's back and shared her work (specifically Photo 51, above) with Watson, giving Watson and Crick what they needed to recognize the double helix.
Franklin was the one who deserved the Nobel (which, if you don't know, she didn't receive). It was only discovered after her death that she was close to deciphering DNA's structure herself.
Watson only deserved a prize for self-promotion. (And this was before his racist and sexist rantings.)
But even Dan Levitt, who clearly knows the score, gives in. What's Gotten Into You gives Watson & Crick 15 pages; Nirenberg and Matthaei get one paragraph.
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