In the spirit of "Einstein's Superpowers"
Look at all that have done biology before. What might their thinking have looked like? Where did they fall short? What were the bottlenecks? I should try to get to a point where they're not mystical. But remember: "You cannot see through Einstein just by saying, 'Einstein is mundane!' if his work still seems like magic unto you."
I've quickly read Chapters 13 and 14 of A Short History of Biology by Asimov; and it's not so complicated. There aren't that many people who do important things and so following it in more detail shouldn't be too hard. But it does give me an appreciation for how quickly progress can happen. And also how things like vitalism really shoot some smart people in the foot.
Even Sanger had only a few tricks. We used chromatography to figure out how many amino acids in each protein; but how do we figure out the arrangement. Here's what Sanger did:
Sanger spent eight years working out the method. He broke down the insulin molecule partway, leaving short chains chromatographically and identified the amino acids making up those chains, as well as the order of arrangement in each. This was not an easy task, since even a four-unit fragment can be arranged in twenty-four different ways, but it was not a completely formidable task either. Slowly, Sanger was able to deduce which longer chains could give rise to just those short chains he had discovered and no others. Little by little, he built up the structure of longer and longer chains until, by 1953, the exact order of the amino acids in the whole insulin molecule had been worked out.
Isn't that basically the Sanger method but applied to proteins?