Chapter 11 Summary

Watson and Francis went to Oxford for the weekend. Watson hadn't taken notes at Rosy's lecture, and his recollection of the information she dispersed was frustratingly vague, especially her report of the amount of water in her DNA samples. Francis would have understood the lecture better and come back with detailed notes, but his presence would have been awkward for Maurice. However, based on Watson's reported water value, Francis narrowed down the possible DNA structures to several models and was optimistic that they could come up with an answer in about a week. They thought the structure must have two, three, or four chains of nucleotides, called polynucleotide chains.

Around a year before, three prominent members of the Cambridge lab, Bragg, Kendrew, and Perutz, published a paper on polypeptide chains which had "missed the point." This failure stung the lab, making them look...