Sir

I am compelled to reply to the comments of Nature's emeritus editor John Maddox (Nature 426, 119; 200310.1038/426119b) concerning Nature's editorial decision not to send the Watson and Crick paper (Nature 171, 737—738; 1953) for peer review. Maddox's retrospective comment “the Crick and Watson paper could not have been refereed: its correctness is self-evident” represents the wisdom of hindsight. To suggest that any model is correct and self-evident on its face leads to acceptance without questioning.

In response to Maddox's comment that the paper could not have been refereed, several capable reviewers were available — Rosalind Franklin, Maurice Wilkins or Erwin Chargaff, for example.

Even Watson and Crick had serious doubts about the correctness of their DNA structure. The 1953 Nature paper expresses self doubt: “previously published X-ray data on deoxyribose nucleic acid are insufficient for a rigorous test of our structure ... it must be regarded as unproved until it has been checked against more exact results”.

In the F. L. Holmes book Meselson, Stahl and the Replication of DNA (Yale Univ. Press, New Haven, 2001), the author notes that Watson “suffered from periodic fears that the structure might be wrong and that he had made an ass of himself. ... Watson really did harbor serious doubts about the validity of their structure for DNA, before and after he and Crick published their first paper in Nature”.

In a letter dated 12 March 1953 to Max Delbrück at Caltech, Watson states: “The X-ray pattern approximately agrees with the model, but since ... we have no photographs of our own ... this agreement in no way constitutes a proof of our model. We certainly are a long way from proving its correctness. ... In the next day or so Crick and I shall send a note to Nature proposing our structure as a possible model, at the same time emphasizing its provisional nature and the lack of proof in its favor.”