Word: brilliants
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...dismal odds, they made a discovery that in the half-century since has transformed science, medicine and much of modern life--though the full impact has yet to be felt. The tale of how this unlikely pair solved the most basic mystery of molecular biology is a reminder that brilliant minds and top-notch training aren't necessarily enough to penetrate the secrets of nature. You also need resilience, dogged persistence, plus a fair amount of luck--and as Watson inadvertently proved with the 1968 best seller The Double Helix, his controversial inside account of the discovery...
...time Watson arrived in Cambridge in the fall of 1951, the brash and brilliant 23-year-old was obsessed with DNA. He had originally set out to become a naturalist (since childhood, he had had an interest in birds), but during his third year at the University of Chicago, Watson read a book titled What Is Life?, by Erwin Schrodinger, a founder of quantum physics. Stepping boldly outside his field of expertise, Schrodinger argued that one of life's essential features is the storage and transmission of information--that is, a genetic code that passes from parent to child...
...Indiana University in 1947 to study viruses, the simplest form of life on the planet and thus the one in which the code might be especially easy to find. By then, scientists had strong evidence that Schrodinger's genetic code was carried by DNA, thanks to a series of brilliant experiments on pneumococcal bacteria, first by Fred Griffith of the British Health Ministry and later by Oswald Avery at the Rockefeller Institute (now Rockefeller University) in New York City...
Still scattering ideas like so many nucleotides, Crick has just co-authored an article in Nature Neuroscience outlining a broad program for probing consciousness by concentrating on visual perception. Says neuroscientist Nikos Logothetis: "Even in old age, he is one of the most brilliant minds I've ever met." Also one of the most stubborn. Though he was flooded with invitations to join in celebrations of his and Watson's historic discovery, Crick has rejected them all. He's too busy, he grumps, to take part in "circuses." --By Frederic Golden
...placed The Dante Club on my syllabus because, perhaps more than most critical works, it breathes new life into the Divine Comedy,” Pertile wrote in an e-mail. “[It] is a superb work of fiction that mixes history and fantasy in such a brilliant way as to make history more vivid than fiction...