Erwin Chargaff

Erwin Chargaff discovered the base-pairing rules that made the structure of DNA solvable, was not credited for it at the time, and spent the rest of his life saying so with considerable style. He was born in Czernowitz in the Habsburg empire, took his doctorate in Vienna, and left Europe in 1935; his mother was deported from Vienna in 1943 and killed. At Columbia he turned to nucleic acids after reading Avery's 1944 paper showing that DNA carried heredity, which he said made him abandon everything he had been doing. Using paper chromatography he established two things: that the base composition of DNA differs between species, which destroyed the assumption that it was a monotonous molecule incapable of carrying information, and that within any species the amount of adenine equals the amount of thymine and guanine equals cytosine. Those ratios are the direct clue to the double helix. He met Watson and Crick in Cambridge in 1952, thought them ignorant of chemistry and said so, and they used his rules without, in his view, adequate acknowledgement; the 1962 Nobel Prize went to Watson, Crick and Wilkins. His bitterness about it was lifelong and articulate. He became a critic of molecular biology as a whole, opposed recombinant DNA research in the 1970s as the practice of a molecular Auschwitz, and wrote essays and a memoir, Heraclitean Fire, that are read as literature. Columbia moved him out of his laboratory when he reached retirement age and he did not forgive that either. He is among the clearest cases of a scientist who supplied the decisive fact and could not see what it meant.

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