DNA discoverer James Watson poses for photographers behind a model of the double helix. Photograph: Markus Schrieber/AP
The latest crop of Nobel prize winners was named over the week in reverential tones - paragons of the disinterested pursuit of truth every one of them. But thanks to James Watson who, with Francis Crick and Maurice Wilkins, won the Nobel for their 1953 discovery of the significance of DNA, we know it's not quite like that.
His book, the Double Helix, entertainingly exposed the ambitions and personal feuds behind the headlines, particularly the tensions with a fourth scientist, Rosalind Franklin, whose X-ray photographs were crucial to their discovery. And he's still at it.
In today's Education Guardian Watson is as dismissive as ever about Franklin, speculating that she was "autistic", "clueless" and "couldn't think in three dimensions very well".
Anything more calculated to infuriate Franklin's admirers, who have seen her as a victim of sexist attitudes at Kings College in the 1950s, is hard to imagine. (By the time the Nobel was awarded she was dead and many feel her role in the DNA breakthrough has never been properly recognised.)
There no suggestion of autism in Lynne Osman Elkin's more balanced account of Franklin's career which didn't end with DNA.
She moved to Birkbeck College London who she worked on RNA viruses with J. Desmond Bernal, who called her photographs "among the most beautiful of any substances ever taken."
So much for not being able to think in 3D.
Overlooked and denigrated at the time, Franklin now has a university named after her - the Rosalind Franklin University of Medicine and Science, Chicago - one honour that, as far as I know, has so far eluded Watson and Crick.
