Double Helix: 50 Years of DNA

Dr from the Source writes "Despite previous posts, tomorrow (April 25, 2003) is the real 50th anniversary of the publication of the famous paper by J. D. Watson and F. Crick in the Nature journal. Readers can download such paper, along with a few other classic ones from Nature's archive."

Comments

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[roberto0]

The actual article is funny because they never would have gotten it published if they didn't propose the mechanism for DNA replication in the same breath.

At the time, crystallography was something geologists did in order to study the composition of rocks. The idea of using xrays to study the crystal patterns of biological molecules was really new at the time. Franklin deserves credit for being innovative in that regard. The real credit that Watson and Crick deserve was that once Crick saw that the structure was a double helix, they were able to put together a decent model for DNA replication. Something people had only guessed about before. Their model wasa still a guess, at best, but they turned out to be right!

The funny part about the whole thing is that the diffraction pattern that they analyzed was no bigger than your fingernail. The picture in the Nature article has actually been blown up from its original size, if you can believe that. Kind of scary how something so important could have been determined by studying something so blurry and small...