Matthew Cobb

And that's, you know, Crick and Wilkins, they don't get it.

Whereas Jim did.

He understood what was happening, and he therefore wrote a racy book.

And one of the things that my friend Nathaniel Comfort has noticed is that through the drafts, Franklin changes dramatically.

In the early drafts, she's presented very straight.

And then gradually, he, because he, I think he probably needs, you know, he needs, he wants from a novelistic point of view, he wants somebody who you can kind of put on, who seems to be obtuse, which he wasn't at all.

And so he then portrays her increasingly badly in the various drafts.

And there's clear echoes of this with a campus novel.

And once you think of it as a campus novel, then these big characters, which they were, right, then you start to be a bit less confident that everything you're reading is true.

And, for example, you know, Brick always said, I never said...

We've discovered the secret of life.

And then in 2016, at the centenary meeting at Cold Spring Harbor, Watson said, yeah, I made it up for dramatic effect.

And he told Crick's granddaughter the same thing.

So read the book, but don't believe it.

I think so.

I mean, there are lots of people working on these topics, but he's the only person who put it all together, and that's what makes it even more striking.

So, for example, messenger RNA, so the intermediate between DNA and protein.

We all know about messenger RNA now because of the fantastic things it's done for vaccines.

And Crick is there at the moment that it is conceptualized, it is born.

He and Sidney Brenner have this public or semi-public, there's about 10 people in the room, and they start jabbering about all the various results that people have been working on and nobody could fit them together.