History is written by the victors, in science as in war. The story of the race to uncover the structure of DNA was thrust into the public imagination by James Watsons highly partial 1968 account, The Double Helix. Ever since, historians have been filling in the gaps. Most notably, successive authors have corrected Watson's unkind portrait of Rosalind Franklin, whose X-ray-diffraction photograph of DNA ('Photo 51') was crucial to the model developed by Watson with Francis Crick. Now science historian Kersten Hall has disinterred another figure from the footnotes of the DNA story, and brought him into the limelight. William Astbury - known to all as Bill - was part of the group of X-ray crystallographers who learned their craft at the feet of William Henry Bragg, the father of the field, at London's Royal Institution in the 1920s. Astbury, along with fellow student J. D. Bernal, was fired with the new technique's possibilities for studying the key molecules of life, especially the proteins that are fundamental to all living tissue.
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机译：历史是胜利者在战争中用科学来写的。詹姆斯·沃森（James Watsons）在1968年极为偏爱的小说《双螺旋》（Double Double Helix），将揭露DNA结构竞赛的故事推向了公众的想象。从那时起，历史学家一直在填补空白。最著名的是，连续的作者纠正了沃森对罗莎琳德·富兰克林的不友好肖像，他的DNA的X射线衍射照片（“照片51”）对于沃森与弗朗西斯·克里克开发的模型至关重要。现在，科学史学家Kersten Hall从DNA故事的脚注中区分出另一个人物，并将其吸引到了众人的视线。威廉·阿斯特伯里（William Astbury）-众所周知的比尔-是X射线晶体学研究人员的一部分，他们在1920年代的伦敦皇家学会威廉·亨利·布拉格（William Henry Bragg）的父亲脚下学习了手工艺。阿斯特伯里（Astbury）和同学J. D.伯纳尔（J. D. Bernal）一起为这项新技术研究生命中的关键分子，特别是对所有生命组织至关重要的蛋白质的可能性而感到震惊。
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