The consequence of, you know, winning is you get a better job. If I hadn't found the DNA structure I wouldn't have got a job at Harvard. And if I hadn't got to Harvard I wouldn't have had all those good graduate students. So the chance that I would really have had a... more than successful career has depended at each stage on winning.

[Q] Could I ask what I have, to me the central question? When you and Francis found the structure, how quickly did you see all the consequences?

You know, what that meant for you personally, what it meant for biology, for science. Oh, 60 seconds, instant. Because it was the answer we had, without having it we talked about complementarity, it was complementarity. So it was replication. Yeah, I mean it was... you don't have to be bright at all to know that you'll have an answer so much better. But you know we would say, what if it was a dull as collagen? You know, three-stranded was pretty, you know, unless you had base-pairing rules between the three strands or something like, which could have lead to something.

[Q] But what about for you personally? Seeing...

Oh, sure. But I would get a girlfriend and, you know, get a Nobel Prize. Maybe I should get the Nobel Prize first, but eventually... No, that was just instantaneous. But... so, the first... in fact, the second emotion was fear. What if it's not right? Because suddenly there was everything out there to get, and what if I... even though it was the perfect structure, it wasn't right? And I think I would sometimes needlessly tell Francis, 'Maybe it's not right'. Because, you know, I didn't want to jinx myself in a sense. Whereas Francis just saw it, of course, as perfect and he should... You know, and while we... what didn't matter if it was right or wrong, it was so perfect. You know, it should be right. So... it would take you a half hour probably you were dumb.

[Q] How long did the fear last?

A month. Yeah, we wrote it up and it was out, you know. We weren't really... certainly the first one was after, you know, we saw Rosalind's beautiful manuscript with the Bessel functions and her data agreed so well with it. That was... that was, I think, the first. There was a fear, you know, for the first week the base-pairing work which you couldn't get the... all the atoms to fit together with good contacts. But I... I don't think we ever, you know, gave that more than a couple per cent chance. It just looked like you could do it.