The Double Helix

One could not be a successful scientist without realizing that , in contrast to the popular conception supported by newspapers and mothers of scientists, a goodly number of scientists are not only narrow-minded and dull, but also just stupid.

In the end, though, science is what matters; scientists not a bit.

On the other hand, the sun of Naples might be conducive to learning something about the biochemistry of the embryonic development of marine animals.

​Briefly, the Indiana biochemists encouraged me to learn organic chemistry, but after I used a bunsen burner to warm up some benzene, I was relieved from further true chemistry. It was safer to turn out an uneducated Ph.D. than to risk another explosion.

Al Hershey had sent me a long letter from Cold Spring Harbor summarizing the recently completed experiments by which he and Martha Chase established that a key feature of the infection of a bacterium by a phage was the injection of the viral DNA into the host bacterium. Most important, very little protein entered the bacterium. Their experiment was thus a powerful new proof that DNA is the primary genetic material. Nonetheless, almost no one in the audience of over four hundred microbiologists seemed interested as I read long sections of Hershey’s letter. Obvious exceptions were André Lwoff, Seymour Benzer, and Gunther Stent, all briefly over from Paris. They knew that Hershey’s experiments were not trivial and that from then on everyone was going to place more emphasis on DNA. To most of the spectators, however, Hershey’s name carried no weight.

Worrying about complications before ruling out the possibility that the answer was simple would have been damned foolishness.