Despite having discovered what today we call DNA, the material of heredity, Friedrich Miescher went to his grave an unhappy man – weighed down by a sense of failure and missed opportunity – as this letter to his friend Ernst Böhm shows rather poignantly.
Miescher’s original letter is shown below, followed by my translation into English of the highlighted text:
‘I will never,’ he once wrote to Böhm [his friend, the German pharmacologist, Rudolf Böhm] know the happiness that belongs to the man who has lived up to their station in a harmonious way to the satisfaction of themselves and others, so my basic mood is the uncomfortable feeling of one who has lost a button from their braces.’ On another occasion he said, ‘For years I have to get used to the fact that, given the condition that my workload is four times as great as my capacity to do it, I must go to bed each night feeling like a schoolboy who has not completed his homework.’
Friedrich Miescher quoted in ‘Die Histochemischen und Physiologischen Arbeiten von Friedrich Miescher’ (‘The Histochemical and Physiological Work of Friedrich Miescher’ compiled by Wilhelm His, 1897, Leipzig); p.31.