"Misleading data, false ideas, problems of personal interrelationships occur in much if not all scientific work. Consider, for example, the discovery of the basic structure of collagen, the major protein of tendons, cartilage, and other tissues. The basic fiber of collagen is made of three long chains wound around one another. Its discovery had all the elements that surrounded the discovery of the double helix. The characters are just as colorful and diverse. The facts were just as confused and the false solutions just as misleading. Competion and friendliness also played a part in the story. Yet nobody has written even one book about the race for the triple helix. This is surely because, in a very real sense, collagen is not as important a molecule as DNA. Of course this depends to some extent on what you consider important. Before Alex Rich and I worked (quite by accident, incidentally) on collagen, we tended to be rather patronizing about it. "After all," we said, "there's no collagen in plants." In 1955, after we got interested in the molecule, we found ourselves saying, "Do you realize that one-third of all the protein in your body is collagen?" But however you look at it, DNA is more important than collagen, more central to biology, and more significant for further research. So, as I have said before: It is the molecule that has the glamour, not the scientists."