Fifty years ago Watson and Crick published a paper entitled
A Structure for Deoxyribose Nucleic Acid. Many publications are commemorating this, including Nature and the New York Times. It was one of the seminal papers of the 20th Century. But we only know that now, looking back. At the time it was only one of three short papers in an issue of Nature. The other two, one by Wilkins, Stokes and Wilson, and the other by Franklin and Gosling, actually provide some real data to discuss.
Watson has said that they were able to work in relative obscurity for several years before others really started to follow this model. The popular press did not report anything for almost a month.
Reread the paper with an open mind and you may be unimpressed. They propose a model with little documented proof and with many obvious problems. In fact, the model that this paper discussed did not immediately revolutionize the world . There were lots of good reasons for the slow acceptance, but, as with any good hypothesis, it presented a framework for determining its value or not.
As often happens in science, the really great papers, the ones that lead to simplifying descriptions of the living world, slowly reveal their importance. Models must be substantiated with scientific proof. Today, with the Internet, it is too easy for the opposite to occur. Everything gets hyped and there is a press release for every little paper written. Scientists, as well as everyone else, will have to gain better filtering mechanisms to deal with this. The Faculty of 1000 from BioMedCentral is one such attempt. I wonder how Watson and Crick’s original paper would have fared?
