Watson and Crick Discover the Double Helix — Structure of DNA
In April 1953, James Watson and Francis Crick published a 900-word paper in Nature titled 'A Structure for Deoxyribose Nucleic Acid.' With characteristic understatement, it noted: 'It has not escaped our notice that the specific pairing we have postulated immediately suggests a possible copying mechanism for the genetic material.' The double helix — two strands of nucleotides wound around each other, held together by base pairs (A-T, G-C) — explained how genetic information was encoded (in the sequence of bases) and copied (each strand serves as a template for the other during replication). Watson and Crick's model was built crucially on X-ray crystallography data produced by Rosalind Franklin and Maurice Wilkins at King's College London, shared without Franklin's knowledge. Watson, Crick, and Wilkins shared the Nobel Prize in 1962; Franklin had died of cancer in 1958 and Nobel Prizes are not awarded posthumously. The discovery launched molecular biology: 1960s — the genetic code was cracked (which triplets of bases code for which amino acids); 1970s — restriction enzymes enabled recombinant DNA (genetic engineering); 1990–2003 — the Human Genome Project sequenced all 3 billion base pairs of the human genome; 2012 — CRISPR-Cas9 enabled precise gene editing.
- Year: 1953 CE
- Category: Scientific
