Comment by Gibbon1
2 days ago
This idea for me comes from a friend that does patent law. He said the hard thing about a patent is knowing what questions need to be answered. Not the answers. It's all about framing the problem, all the hard hard is really there.
We reward and give status to scientists that come up with answers and the people doing the hard framing work not so much. The two guys that used standard crystallography techniques to figure out DNA is a double helix got the Nobel prize. The lady that figured out how to crystalize DNA and get the films is completely ignored.
So yeah top scientists high on their own ego will totally biff it when dealing with some other field they know nothing about.
Rosalind Franklin didn't figure out how to crystalize the DNA, they were doing fiber diffraction. Similarly, the films were collected by her student Raymond Gosling. She shared her work at a department seminar and published it internally (Crick didn't "steal" it). And she was also published in the same exact journal of Nature.
The reason W&C won the prize is that not only did the propose the (close to correct) structure, they realized it was a antiparallel double helix, and deduced the underlying mechanism for genetic replication: "It has not escaped our notice that the specific pairing we have postulated immediately suggests a possible copying mechanism for the genetic material." and also made a few key observations about isomerization in bases that allows for G/C and A/T pairing to be specific.
Crick was a genius, although he also went off-piste with panspermia, and Watson is just an asshole. Franklin was a great scientist but it's not clear at all that she should have or would have received the prize.