On Crick and Watson upon reading Mayr; The Growth of Biological Thought
Noted - October 21, 2002
By Jack Vaughan
In search of inspiration, or scientific history, people are more likely to beat it down the path to the successful, than to take the rainy scenic route mottled with failure. But to find the thought process behind successful discovery, one is better served by studying both failures and the successes along the way.
Unless you have an easily tapped well of curiosity, you don’t want to look at all the missteps on the way to the double helix, and will instead pick up the story of the genetic blueprint with Watson and Crick, with perhaps a nod to Mendel, Darwin, and a few others that went before.
But a look back at the search for the structure of DNA proves interesting for what it shows about what we didn’t know we knew, and for the thinking we had to unthink, to know what we did.
Those who studied the cell had run out of steam in the hunt for the code late in the 19th century. The unlocking of the code required an understanding of chemistry that few of them perhaps did posses. It took a good number of years, and the creation of the discipline of biochemistry (and radioactive crystallography, and more), before the search bore fruit. A natural cultural bias against the simple DNA molecule had it that a more complex molecule had to be the basis of inheritance.
Crick and Watson were not necessarily experts in their fields. They did, however, ask a lot of questions in people in like and unlike fields, and they had a puzzler’s enthusiasm, relying on deduction, intuition and endless work with wooden models of molecules to uncover the double helix formula.
Amazon The Growth of Biological Thought: Diversity, Evolution, and Inheritance
Amazon The Double Helix: A Personal Account of the Discovery of the Structure of DNA
Amazon Rosalind Franklin and DNA
Amazon Listmania! My Favorite Biology Books by James Hutchins
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