It was, in fact, a rush job. Pauling knew that DNA was important; he knew that Wilkins and Franklin were after it and that Watson and Crick had already made an attempt. He knew that it was a relatively simple structure compared to proteins. And he knew that whoever got out a roughly correct structure first - even if it was not quite right in all its details - would establish priority for a very significant discovery.

That is what he was aiming for: not the last word on DNA but the first. He wanted the initial publication that would be cited by all following. It did not have to be precise.

The hurried haphazardness of the Pauling-Corey paper can best be understood by comparison to Pauling's protein work. Pauling's alpha helix was the result of more than a decade of off-and-on analysis and thousands of man-hours of meticulous crystallographic work. Before he published his model, his lab pinned down the structure of the amino-acid subunits to a fraction of a degree and a hundredth of an angstrom. There was an abundance of clean x-ray work available on the subject proteins, allowing Pauling to scrutinize and eliminate dozens of alternative structures. Two years passed between the time he came up with the rough idea for his helix and the time he published it. Much of that interval was spent with Corey, overseeing and refining the precise construction of a series of elaborate three-dimensional models. None of that went into DNA.