Reply #23: I've gotten the impression that Watson was extremely lucky to have worked for Crick.

[eppur_se_muova]

Not that Watson isn't a very capable guy. But (Sir Francis) Crick was one of the many physicists who turned towards biology in the postwar years and began the revolution in what is now called "Molecular Biology". Read Judson's "Eighth Day of Creation" and you will find Crick did a *lot* more work besides determining the structure of DNA. He was trained as a physicist (working in X-ray diffraction), became a molecular biologist, and later a neuroscientist.

(Actually, the wiki http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_Crick provides a good summary of the whole debate over who did what, and why Franklin did not receive more credit. In part, she may not have deserved more, despite the efforts of some to romanticize her as a victim of male power structures. Franklin apparently did superb experimental work, but did not have the theoretical background necessary to draw more conclusions from the work. WARNING: Reading the whole entry will leave almost anyone feeling like an underachiever -- Crick had a VERY full career.)