60 Years of DNA

Clive Cookson:

Sixty years ago this weekend the race to pin down the structure of DNA, the molecule of inheritance, was at a critical stage. In Cambridge Francis Crick and Jim Watson were realising how well a double helix would fit the available data. Meanwhile at King's College London the dysfunctional team of Maurice Wilkins and Rosalind Franklin, who had provided Crick and Watson with their most important evidence, were still unaware of the breakthrough in Cambridge.

At this point Wilkins sent Crick a letter looking forward to the imminent departure of "our dark lady" - Franklin - to a new job at Birkbeck College. This would leave him free to take part in a final push to discover how genes are encoded. "I have started up a general offensive on nature's secret strongholds on all fronts," he wrote. "At last the decks are clear and we can put all hands to the pumps! It won't be long now."

Posted by Jim Zellmer at March 5, 2013 2:35 AM
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