Crick, twelve years older and still without a doctorate, was less memorably hirsute and slightly more tweedy. In Watson's account he is presented as blustery, nosy, cheerfully argumentative, impatient with anyone slow to share a notion, and constantly in danger of being asked to go elsewhere. Neither was formally trained in biochemistry.

Their assumption was that if you could determine the shape of a DNA molecule you would be able to see — correctly, as it turned out — how it did what it did. They hoped to achieve this, it would appear, by doing as little work as possible beyond thinking, and no more of that than was absolutely necessary. As Watson cheerfully (if a touch disingenuously) remarked in his autobiographical book The Double Helix, "It was my hope that the gene might be solved without my learning any chemistry." They weren't actually assigned to work on DNA, and at one point were ordered to stop it. Watson was ostensibly mastering the art of crystallography; Crick was supposed to be completing a thesis on the X-ray diffraction of large molecules.