Watson knew “nothing about the X-ray diffraction technique,” but he had an unfailing intuition about the importance of certain biological problems. Trained as an ornithologist at the University of Chicago, he had assiduously “avoid[ed] taking any chemistry or physics courses which looked of even medium difficulty.” But a kind of homing instinct had led him to DNA. He too had read Schrödinger’s What Is Life? and been captivated. He had been working on the chemistry of nucleic acids in Copenhagen—“a complete flop,” as he would later describe it—but Wilkins’s photograph entranced him. “The fact
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