I also would like to add that this "Great Man theory of History" is wrong for Watson quite a bit. A lot of that is already referenced in this thread, but I would like to point to the collective effort of untangling DNA that did preced Watson. Without him there would still be all the results we got now there. When Watson was born there were already ideas of what could be described as DNA, but of course the imaging is quite important, but it was bound to happen (unless a nuclear war would've broken out).