Word: crick
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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They remained collaborators in name but essentially stopped talking. To find out what she was doing, Wilkins had to go to a seminar Franklin gave in November 1951. He invited Watson to come along. (Crick, whose interest in DNA was well known, thought it might cause too much of a flap if he showed up.) Wilkins had warned Watson that Franklin was difficult; for his part, Watson had a generally piggish attitude toward women at the time. He liked "popsies"--young, pretty things without brains--but strong, independent women rather baffled him. In The Double Helix, he puts Franklin down...
...moment, though, the men were stuck with "Rosy's" data, and Watson briefed Crick as soon as possible on what he had seen and heard. But Watson, overconfident to the point of arrogance, hadn't bothered to take notes. "If a subject interested me," he would write, "I could usually recollect what I needed. This time, however, we were in trouble, because I did not know enough of the crystallographic jargon." A key point was the amount of water present in Franklin's DNA samples. Watson remembered the number incorrectly...
...weeks later, Crick and Watson were pretty sure they had it. DNA was a triple helix. They invited Wilkins to take a look at their model, and to their surprise, Franklin came along too. It didn't take long for everyone to realize that Watson's memory had betrayed him. The amount of water a DNA molecule had to contain was a whopping 10 times the quantity he had assumed. The structure Crick and Watson had so confidently come up with was impossible...
Their mistake had two immediate effects. First, Bragg, already fed up with Crick's impertinence, forbade the pair to work actively on DNA. Second, Franklin, previously suspicious of Crick and even more so of Watson, was convinced that the latter, at least, was a blithering idiot. Chagrined, Watson and Crick turned over their model-making kits to the King's group and urged Wilkins and Franklin to use them. Watson and Crick may have been ambitious for themselves, but they were passionate about knowing the structure of DNA. If they couldn't make the discovery, they would have to acquiesce...
Watson turned grudgingly to work on the structure of the tobacco mosaic virus, and Crick went back to hemoglobin. But no mere lab director could keep them from talking about dna between themselves. And while their blunder the first time around had been dispiriting, it didn't discourage them. After all, they had no reputations to be tarnished. And if they had come to the wrong conclusions based on incomplete information and a dumb mistake, that was just an incentive to get better information and be more careful next time...