The greatest blunder of the greatest scientists

In Inspiring Science: Jim Watson and the Age of DNA, Elof Carlson wrote an article of “Monday Morning Quarterback” describing his encounter with Linus Pauling.  While being in charge of a seminar in 1968, he picked up Pauling who was to give 5 lectures.  At which time Watson’s The Double Helix first went on sale.  He wrote,

“I then asked Pauling a question, “If you had seen Franklin’s x-ray photograph of DNA that was shown to Watson, would you have interpreted the structure that Watson and Crick presented?”  Pauling immediately replied, “You know, that’s not the way science works.  Sometimes your mind is so set you don’t see the obvious.”

I found it interesting for the sake to set the record straight.  We all  know during the height of Pauling’s protest against nuclear weapon and war, his passport was once revoked by the State Department, denying him the chance to attend a conference, during which Rosalind Franklin was to present her x-ray crystallography of DNA, which yields crucial information to solve the structure of DNA.  This leads to the “Monday morning quarterback’ opinion/speculation that Pauling would have got it right before Watson and Crick did had he attended the conference.
 
Pauling’s response further proves what a great man he was! α-helix structure of protein is from Pauling, and for a while he was so convinced that DNA is made of three helices, instead of double helices.  With three helices, the ‘fatal’ mistake was the sugar-phosphate backbone will be tucked inside, which is theoretically impossible. (I once asked Joy, who was then in her first undergraduate year, and she immediately pointed out the charged phosphate groups can’t get along well in the hydrophobic environment inside) and yet, the greatest chemist ever missed it—this is what he meant “the obvious”.

This is not the only ‘greatest blunder’ of the ‘greatest scientists’.  In 1950, Lawrence Bragg, Max Perutz, and John Kendrew published a paper on protein structure and failed to recognize the peptide bond is planar (the planar peptide bond was also discovered by Pauling), Bragg later called the work “the most ill-planned and abortive in which I have ever been involved.”
 

At age of 24, Sir Lawrence Bragg and his dad, William shared the Nobel Prize in Physics for discovering the now called Bragg’s Law of diffraction, upon which the x-ray crystallography technique was developed. 

James Watson went to Cambridge to work under John Kendrew before the fate brought him and Crick together.  Perutz (hemoglobin structure) and Kendrew (myoglobin structure) shared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry the same year when Watson and Crick were so honored. And Linus Pauling was also there, for Peace Prize, this time around.

Every student learns the planar peptide bond during the first week of the biochemistry class; and yet all these three Nobel laureates missed it!