An example that’s probably * not* a highly counterfactual discovery is the discovery of DNA as the inheritance particle by Watson & Crick [? Wilkins, Franklin, Gosling, Pauling...].
I had great fun reading Watson’s scientific-literary fiction the Double Helix.
Watson and Crick are very clear that competitors were hot on their heels, a matter of months, a year perhaps.
EDIT: thank you nitpickers. I should have said structure of DNA, not its role as the carrier of inheritance.
Nitpick: you’re talking about the discovery of the structure of DNA; it was already known at that time to be the particle which mediates inheritance IIRC.
I would say “the thing that contains the inheritance particles” rather than “the inheritance particle”. “Particulate inheritance” is a technical term within genetics and it refers to how children don’t end up precisely with the mean of their parents’ traits (blending inheritance), but rather with some noise around that mean, which particulate inheritance asserts is due to the genetic influence being separated into discrete particles with the children receiving random subsets of their parent’s genes. The significance of this is that under blending inheritance, the genetic variation between organisms within a species would be averaged away in a small number of generations, which would make evolution by natural selection ~impossible (as natural selection doesn’t work without genetic variation).
An example that’s probably * not* a highly counterfactual discovery is the discovery of DNA as the inheritance particle by Watson & Crick [? Wilkins, Franklin, Gosling, Pauling...].
I had great fun reading Watson’s scientific-literary fiction the Double Helix. Watson and Crick are very clear that competitors were hot on their heels, a matter of months, a year perhaps.
EDIT: thank you nitpickers. I should have said structure of DNA, not its role as the carrier of inheritance.
Nitpick: you’re talking about the discovery of the structure of DNA; it was already known at that time to be the particle which mediates inheritance IIRC.
I would say “the thing that contains the inheritance particles” rather than “the inheritance particle”. “Particulate inheritance” is a technical term within genetics and it refers to how children don’t end up precisely with the mean of their parents’ traits (blending inheritance), but rather with some noise around that mean, which particulate inheritance asserts is due to the genetic influence being separated into discrete particles with the children receiving random subsets of their parent’s genes. The significance of this is that under blending inheritance, the genetic variation between organisms within a species would be averaged away in a small number of generations, which would make evolution by natural selection ~impossible (as natural selection doesn’t work without genetic variation).