One of the Most Egregious Ripoffs in the History of Science – The Race to DNA

James Watson once said his road to the 1962 Nobel Prize began in Naples, Italy. At a conference in 1951, he met Maurice Wilkins, the biophysicist with whom he and Francis Crick shared the Nobel for discovering the double-helix structure of DNA. Meeting Wilkins was when he “first realized that DNA might be soluble,” Watson said. “So my life was changed.” That’s a nice anecdote for the science textbooks. But there’s “a tawdry first act to this operetta,” writes Howard Markel in his new book, The Secret of Life, about the drama behind the scenes of the famous discovery. At the time, Watson was an arrogant, gawky 22-year-old, working as a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Copenhagen. His biology lab director, Herman Kalckar, invited Watson and another fellow in the lab, Barbara Wright, to accompany him to the Naples conference. The confident and competitive Watson didn’t think much of Wright’s work. It was “rather inexact,” he sniped. But Watson was pleased to be invited on the tr ... Read full article.