Decades before Watson and Crick, when he wasn’t womanizing or stuffing cats into quantum boxes, the great Austrian physicist Erwin Schrodinger whipped off a little book called What is Life? in which he speculated that DNA might be the genetic material. This just goes to show you what a smart guy Schrodinger was—not that anybody really listened to his biological musings at the time.

Figure 2. Erwin Schrodinger, one of history's heaviest thinkers.