I've been reading @matthewcobb's new biography on Francis Crick. It contains many surprises, especially regarding the solving of DNA's structure. I finished reading through 1953. Here my notes so far: 1. Photograph 51 was not taken by Rosalind Franklin. It was taken by Raymond Gosling, a PhD student working with Franklin, in May 1952. 2. Also, Photograph 51 played no role in Watson/Crick's model. Writhes Cobb: "Crick did not see the photo until weeks after they had discovered the structure, nor did it provide Watson with any new information beyond a very rough idea of the itensity distribution [of the x-ray crystallography data.]" Franklin's real contribution to the structure, and an idea which she discussed as early as 1951, was instead that the crystalline form of DNA was "a face-centred monoclinic unit cell with the C-axis parallel to the fibre axis." In other words, her crystallography data showed that there were two strands in DNA, and that those strands ran antiparallel with the bases inside. Again, she publicly disclosed this in a 1951 lecture, but apparently all Watson could recall about that lecture was Franklin's appearance, as he later described in his book. 3. It's widely thought that Watson and Crick, after building their model, walked into the Eagle pub in Cambridge and told "everyone within hearing distance that [they] had found the secret of life." This came from Watson's book, The Double Helix, but it is entirely made up. Crick said it did not happen, and Watson admitted the same in 2016. 4. Around the same time that Max Perutz was trying to solve a protein structure for the first time, a researcher in New York named David Harker received a $1 million grant to try to become the first instead. This is surprising for two reasons: a) I had never heard of Harker and b) $1 million was a HUGE sum at the time; a typical house in England cost ~$1,800 at the time. TL;DR The best-funded labs do not always get the spoils. 5. Between 1947 and 1949, "nearly two hundred papers were published on DNA." This at a time when papers were much less frequent than they are now. This was surprising because the structure, let alone proof that DNA was the genetic material, did not come until many years later! The lesson, of course, is that just because a field seems "hot" does not mean you should not work on it; the big discovery may still be there for the taking. 6. Freeman Dyson warned Crick against migrating from physics into biology. "If you switch to biology now, you will be too old to do the exciting stuff when biology finally takes off," Dyson told him. 7. Watson and Crick (and many other molecular biologists who came from physics) explicitly said they decided to pivot into biology after reading Schrodinger's small book, "What is Life?" In short, writing can have a huge influence on the trajectory or invention of scientific fields. I recommend reading this book. My short social media posts cannot do the story justice.