Sir Isaac Newton once declared that his momentous discoveries were only made thanks to having stood on the shoulders of giants. The same might also be said of the scientists James Watson and Francis Crick. Their discovery of the structure of DNA was, without doubt, one of the biggest scientific landmarks in history and, thanks largely to the success of Watsons best-selling memoir The Double Helix, there might seem to be little new to say about this story.But much remains to be said about the particular giants on whose shoulders Watson and Crick stood. Of these, the crystallographer Rosalind Franklin, whose famous X-ray diffraction photograph known as Photo 51 provided Watson and Crick with a vital clue, is now well recognised. Far less well known is the physicist William T. Astbury who, working at Leeds in the 193s on the structure of wool for the local textile industry, pioneered the use of X-ray crystallography to study biologicalfibres. In so doing, he not only made the very first studies of the structure of DNA culminating in a photo almost identical to Franklins Photo 51, but also founded the new scienc