In the summer of 2006 Marshall W. Nirenberg chanced on a just
published biography of a prominent molecular biologist. It was
entitled Francis Crick: Discoverer of the Genetic Code. “That’s
awful!” he thought. “It’s wrong—it’s really and truly wrong!”
Nirenberg himself, along with two other scientists, had received
the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1968 “for their
interpretation of the genetic code and its function in protein
synthesis,” and neither of his co-winners happened to be named
Crick. (They were in fact Robert W. Holley and Har Gobind
Khorana.) The incident was testimony to the inconstancy of fame.
And it was by no means an isolated example, as Nirenberg knew
from the long and bitter experience of seeing similar
misattributions elsewhere. The breaking of the genetic code was
one of the most important advances in molecular biology,
secondary only to the discovery of the double-helical structure
of DNA in 1953 by Crick and James D. Watson. But whereas they
are household names, Marshall Niren