Watson and Crick
James Watson and Francis Crick determined the double helix structure of DNA in 1953, establishing how genetic information is stored and copied. They met at the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge in 1951: Watson an American zoologist of twenty-three who had taken a doctorate at Indiana, and Crick a British physicist of thirty-five who had spent the war on naval mines and had not yet finished his own doctorate. Neither was assigned to work on DNA. Their method was model building rather than experiment. They worked from three sources: Erwin Chargaff's finding that adenine and thymine occurred in equal amounts, as did guanine and cytosine; Linus Pauling's demonstration that protein chains form helices; and the X-ray diffraction work being done at King's College London by Rosalind Franklin and Maurice Wilkins. The decisive evidence was Franklin's Photograph 51, an X-ray image of the B form of DNA whose cross pattern indicates a helix and whose spacing gives its dimensions. Wilkins showed it to Watson in January 1953 without her knowledge, and her unpublished report reached them through a Medical Research Council committee. She has since been widely regarded as inadequately credited. They published a one-page paper in Nature on 25 April 1953, noting with deliberate understatement that the specific pairing they had postulated immediately suggests a possible copying mechanism. The structure explained heredity: two strands held by complementary base pairs, each able to serve as a template for the other. Watson, Crick and Wilkins shared the 1962 Nobel Prize; Franklin had died of ovarian cancer in 1958 at thirty-seven. Crick went on to genetic coding and neuroscience. Watson led the Human Genome Project and was stripped of his honorary titles in 2019 after repeating racist claims about intelligence.
- Lived: 1928 CE – 2004 CE
- Nationality: British/American
- Roles: molecular_biologist, scientist
