Double-Helix Model of DNA Paper Published 59 Years Ago

pigrabbitbear writes with musings on the anniversary of the groundbreaking paper on DNA structure by Watson and Crick. From the article: "Consider every organism that's ever lived on Earth. From dinosaurs to bacteria, the number is near infinite, and an overwhelming majority have their entire structures and lives dictated according to their DNA. The DNA molecule is life itself, and it's astonishing that we've only known what it looks like for less than a century. But it's true: In one of the most groundbreaking papers ever published, James D. Watson and Francis Crick described the double-helix structure of DNA in Nature, 59 years ago today."

Comments

Rosalind Franklin

[betterunixthanunix]

Rosalind Franklin deserves credit. Shew as not the first to publish, but it was her data that Watson and Crick used and she had come to the same conclusion as they had.

Re:Rosalind Franklin

[Samantha Wright]

And therein lies the real charm of how this story is worded: the celebration is in favour of the publication of a description, not the discovery. The last link in the summary covers the controversy a bit; though it leaves out mention of the graduate student that Watson and Crick acquired to help them through the hydrogen bonding, the name of whom escapes me at the moment. (Anyone remember?) I always felt he deserved more credit than he got.

All thanks to LSD

[GameboyRMH]

Who knows how much longer it would have taken to discover if Crick wasn't tripping balls:

http://www.miqel.com/entheogens/francis_crick_dna_lsd.html

Near Infinite

[ooshna]

Consider every organism that's ever lived on Earth. From dinosaurs to bacteria, the number is near infinite, and an overwhelming majority have their entire structures and lives dictated according to their DNA

The number of organisms that ever lived is as close to infinity as the amount of protons in the cosmos. No where near to infinite at all.

Are you kidding?

[dtmos]

60 is a wonderful number. It is both a unitary perfect number and a Harshad number. It's the smallest number that can be expressed as the sum of two odd primes in 6 ways. It has many nice geometric representations resulting from its highly composite nature.

Of course this is all redundant, because there is no such thing as an uninteresting natural number.

Re:Why now?

[grub]

60 years is exactly 1% of the age of the Earth. The perfect segue into exposing the lies of evolution!

Re:Why now?

[ColdWetDog]

Less irrelevant trivia: As usual, everybody is getting all fuzzy eyed about Watson (who was a flaming asshole) and Crick (who was a really nice guy and the brains of the outfit). But it's easy to forget Rosalind Frankilin who did much of the heavy lifting that Watson & Crick tend to get credit for.

As even they have said, once you see the structure, the general mechanism is pretty obvious.