Watson And Crick Quotes

You could give Aristotle a tutorial. And you could thrill him to the core of his being. Aristotle was an encyclopedic polymath, an all time intellect. Yet not only can you know more than him about the world. You also can have a deeper understanding of how everything works. Such is the privilege of living after Newton, Darwin, Einstein, Planck, Watson, Crick and their colleagues. I'm not saying you're more intelligent than Aristotle, or wiser. For all I know, Aristotle's the cleverest person who ever lived. That's not the point. The point is only that science is cumulative, and we live later.

[When asked by a student if he believes in any gods] Oh, no. Absolutely not... The biggest advantage to believing in God is you don't have to understand anything, no physics, no biology. I wanted to understand.

You could give Aristotle a tutorial. And you could thrill him to the core of his being ... Such is the privilege of living after Newton, Darwin, Einstein, Planck, Watson, Crick and their colleagues.

I think that the formation of [DNA's] structure by Watson and Crick may turn out to be the greatest developments in the field of molecular genetics in recent years.

At lunch Francis winged into the Eagle to tell everyone within hearing distance that we had found the secret of life.

It is one of the striking generalizations of biochemistry—which surprisingly is hardly ever mentioned in the biochemical text-books—that the twenty amino acids and the four bases, are, with minor reservations, the same throughout Nature. As far as I am aware the presently accepted set of twenty amino acids was first drawn up by Watson and myself in the summer of 1953 in response to a letter of Gamow's.

The fundamental biological variant is DNA. That is why Mendel's definition of the gene as the unvarying bearer of hereditary traits, its chemical identification by Avery (confirmed by Hershey), and the elucidation by Watson and Crick of the structural basis of its replicative invariance, are without any doubt the most important discoveries ever made in biology. To this must be added the theory of natural selection, whose certainty and full significance were established only by those later theories.

What is truly revolutionary about molecular biology in the post-Watson-Crick era is that it has become digital...the machine code of the genes is uncannily computer-like.' -Richard Dawkins

Two revolutions coincided in the 1950s. Mathematicians, including Claude Shannon and Alan Turing, showed that all information could be encoded by binary digits, known as bits. This led to a digital revolution powered by circuits with on-off switches that processed information. Simultaneously, Watson and Crick discovered how instructions for building every cell in every form of life were encoded by the four-letter sequences of DNA. Thus was born an information age based on digital coding (0100110111001…) and genetic coding (ACTGGTAGATTACA…). The flow of history is accelerated when two rivers converge.

So while Pauling struggled with his model, Watson and Crick turned theirs inside out, so the negative phosphorus ions wouldn’t touch. This gave them a sort of twisted ladder—the famed double helix.

Jonathan Sacks; “One way is just to think, for instance, of biodiversity. The extraordinary thing we now know, thanks to Crick and Watson’s discovery of DNA and the decoding of the human and other genomes, is that all life, everything, all the three million species of life and plant life—all have the same source. We all come from a single source. Everything that lives has its genetic code written in the same alphabet. Unity creates diversity. So don’t think of one God, one truth, one way. Think of one God creating this extraordinary number of ways, the 6,800 languages that are actually spoken. Don’t think there’s only one language within which we can speak to God. The Bible is saying to us the whole time: Don’t think that God is as simple as you are. He’s in places you would never expect him to be. And you know, we lose a bit of that in English translation. When Moses at the burning bush says to God, “Who are you?” God says to him three words: “Hayah asher hayah.”Those words are mistranslated in English as “I am that which I am.” But in Hebrew, it means “I will be who or how or where I will be,” meaning, Don’t think you can predict me. I am a God who is going to surprise you. One of the ways God surprises us is by letting a Jew or a Christian discover the trace of God’s presence in a Buddhist monk or a Sikh tradition of hospitality or the graciousness of Hindu life. Don’t think we can confine God into our categories. God is bigger than religion.

At the close of the nineteenth century, most biologists thought life consisted solely of matter and energy. But after Watson and Crick, biologists came to recognize the importance of a third fundamental entity in living things: information.

Wielding imaging techniques such as X-ray crystallography, which is what Rosalind Franklin used to find evidence of the structure of DNA, structural biologists try to discover the three-dimensional shape of molecules. Linus Pauling worked out the spiral structure of proteins in the early 1950s, which was followed by Watson and Crick’s paper on the double-helix structure of DNA.

The original Watson and Crick model of DNA, with its hammered metal plates and rickety rods twisting precariously around a steel laboratory stand, is housed behind a glass case. The model looks like a latticework corkscrew invented by a madman, or an impossibly fragile spiral staircase that might connect the human past to its future. Crick’s handwritten scribbles—A, C, T, and G—still adorn the plates.

Look in it,' he said, smiling slightly, as you do when you have given someone a present which you know will please him and he is unwrapping it before your eyes. I opened it. In the folder I found four 8×10 glossy photos, obviously professionally done; they looked like the kind of stills that the publicity departments of movie studios put out. The photos showed a Greek vase, on it a painting of a male figure who we recognized as Hermes. Twined around the vase the double helix confronted us, done in red glaze against a black background. The DNA molecule. There could be no mistake. 'Twenty-three or -four hundred years ago,' Fat said. 'Not the picture but the krater, the pottery.' 'A pot,' I said. 'I saw it in a museum in Athens. It's authentic. Thats not a matter of my own opinion; I'm not qualified to judge such matters; it's authenticity has been established by the museum authorities. I talked with one of them. He hadn't realized what the design shows; he was very interested when I discussed it with him. This form of vase, the krater, was the shape later used as the baptismal font. That was one of the Greek words that came into my head in March 1974, the word “krater”. I heard it connected with another Greek word: “poros”. The words “poros krater” essentially mean “limestone font”. ' There could be no doubt; the design, predating Christianity, was Crick and Watson's double helix model at which they had arrived after so many wrong guesses, so much trial-and-error work. Here it was, faithfully reproduced. 'Well?' I said. 'The so-called intertwined snakes of the caduceus. Originally the caduceus, which is still the symbol of medicine was the staff of- not Hermes-but-' Fat paused, his eyes bright. 'Of Asklepios. It has a very specific meaning, besides that of wisdom, which the snakes allude to; it shows that the bearer is a sacred person and not to be molested...which is why Hermes the messenger of the gods, carried it.' None of us said anything for a time. Kevin started to utter something sarcastic, something in his dry, witty way, but he did not; he only sat without speaking. Examining the 8×10 glossies, Ginger said, 'How lovely!' 'The greatest physician in all human history,' Fat said to her. 'Asklepios, the founder of Greek medicine. The Roman Emperor Julian-known to us as Julian the Apostate because he renounced Christianity-conside​red Asklepios as God or a god; Julian worshipped him. If that worship had continued, the entire history of the Western world would have basically changed

get a peek at them was seldom matched by more engaging qualities, like respect. “I’m afraid we always used to adopt—let’s say a patronizing attitude toward her,” Crick later recalled. Two of these men were from a competing institution and the third was more or less openly siding with them. It should hardly come as a surprise that she kept her results locked away. That Wilkins and Franklin did not get along was a fact that Watson and Crick seem to have exploited to their benefit. Although Crick and Watson were

In 1962, Watson, Crick, and Wilkins won the Nobel Prize for their discovery. Franklin was not included in the prize. She had died in 1958, at the age of thirty-seven, from diffusely metastatic ovarian cancer-an illness ultimately linked to mutations in genes.

By then Watson and Crick had a pretty good idea of DNA’s structure. It had two sugar-phosphate strands that twisted and spiraled to form a double-stranded helix. Protruding from these were the four bases in DNA: adenine, thymine, guanine, and cytosine, now commonly known by the letters A, T, G, and C. They came to agree with Franklin that the backbones were on the outside and the bases pointed inward, like a twisted ladder or spiral staircase. As Watson later admitted in a feeble attempt at graciousness, “Her past uncompromising statements on this matter thus reflected first-rate science

As a thought experiment, von Neumann's analysis was simplicity itself. He was saying that the genetic material of any self-reproducing system, whether natural or artificial, must function very much like a stored program in a computer: on the one hand, it had to serve as live, executable machine code, a kind of algorithm that could be carried out to guide the construction of the system's offspring; on the other hand, it had to serve as passive data, a description that could be duplicated and passed along to the offspring. As a scientific prediction, that same analysis was breathtaking: in 1953, when James Watson and Francis Crick finally determined the molecular structure of DNA, it would fulfill von Neumann's two requirements exactly. As a genetic program, DNA encodes the instructions for making all the enzymes and structural proteins that the cell needs in order to function. And as a repository of genetic data, the DNA double helix unwinds and makes a copy of itself every time the cell divides in two. Nature thus built the dual role of the genetic material into the structure of the DNA molecule itself.

and Muller deepened this understanding by demonstrating that genes were physical—material—structures carried on chromosomes. Avery advanced this understanding of genes by identifying the chemical form of that material: genetic information was carried in DNA. Watson, Crick, Wilkins, and Franklin solved its molecular structure as a double helix, with two paired, complementary strands.

The blooper’ as Watson described it, 'was too unbelievable to keep secret for more than a few minutes.’ He dashed over to a chemist friend in the neighboring lab to show him Pauling’s structure. The chemist concurred, 'The giant [Pauling] had forgotten elementary college chemistry.’ Watson told Crick, and both took off for the Eagle, their favorite pub, where they celebrated Pauling’s failure with shots of schadenfreude infused whiskey.

La mecánica cuántica era tan potente que permitía determinar el ángulo con el que se enlazaban los diferentes átomos para crear moléculas. Como un niño con un juego de Lego, era posible construir cadenas, átomo por átomo, para reproducir la estructura real de una molécula compleja. Watson y Crick se dieron cuenta de que la molécula de ADN era uno de los principales constituyentes del núcleo de una célula, así que era una probable candidata.

DNA is the basis for all life on Earth. It has a double-helix structure, like a spiral staircase, which was discovered by Francis Crick and James Watson in the Cavendish lab at Cambridge in 1953. The two strands of the double helix are linked by pairs of nitrogenous bases like the treads in a spiral staircase. There are four kinds of nitrogenous bases: cytosine, guanine, adenine and thymine. The order in which the different nitrogenous bases occur along the spiral staircase carries the genetic information that enables the DNA molecule to assemble an organism around it and reproduce itself.

Instead, the most common alternative in these studies is for subjects to read a cogent discussion about our lack of free will. Studies have often used a passage from Francis Crick’s 1994 book, The Astonishing Hypothesis: The Scientific Search for the Soul (Scribner). Crick, of the Watson-and-Crick duo who identified the structure of DNA, grew fascinated with the brain and consciousness in his later years. A hard determinist as well as an elegant, clear writer, Crick summarizes the scientific argument for our being merely the sum of our biological components. “Who you are is nothing but a pack of neurons,” he concludes.[3]

One of the most powerful tools for discovering structure is ‘X-ray diffraction’ or, because it is always applied to crystals of the substance of interest, ‘X-ray crystallography’. The technique has been a gushing fountain of Nobel prizes, starting with Wilhelm Röntgen’s discovery of X-rays (awarded in 1901, the first physics prize), then William and his son Laurence Bragg in 1915, Peter Debye in 1936, and continuing with Dorothy Hodgkin (1964), and culminating with Maurice Wilkins (but not Rosalind Franklin) in 1962, which provided the foundation of James Watson’s and Francis Crick’s formulation of the double-helix structure of DNA, with all its huge implications for understanding inheritance, tackling disease, and capturing criminals (a prize shared with Wilkins in 1962). If there is one technique that is responsible for blending biology into chemistry, then this is it. Another striking feature of this list is that the prize has been awarded in all three scientific categories: chemistry, physics, and physiology and medicine, such is the range of the technique and the illumination it has brought.

In 1950, a thirty-year-old scientist named Rosalind Franklin arrived at King’s College London to study the shape of DNA. She and a graduate student named Raymond Gosling created crystals of DNA, which they bombarded with X-rays. The beams bounced off the crystals and struck photographic film, creating telltale lines, spots, and curves. Other scientists had tried to take pictures of DNA, but no one had created pictures as good as Franklin had. Looking at the pictures, she suspected that DNA was a spiral-shaped molecule—a helix. But Franklin was relentlessly methodical, refusing to indulge in flights of fancy before the hard work of collecting data was done. She kept taking pictures. Two other scientists, Francis Crick and James Watson, did not want to wait. Up in Cambridge, they were toying with metal rods and clamps, searching for plausible arrangements of DNA. Based on hasty notes Watson had written during a talk by Franklin, he and Crick put together a new model. Franklin and her colleagues from King’s paid a visit to Cambridge to inspect it, and she bluntly told Crick and Watson they had gotten the chemistry all wrong. Franklin went on working on her X-ray photographs and growing increasingly unhappy with King’s. The assistant lab chief, Maurice Wilkins, was under the impression that Franklin was hired to work directly for him. She would have none of it, bruising Wilkins’s ego and leaving him to grumble to Crick about “our dark lady.” Eventually a truce was struck, with Wilkins and Franklin working separately on DNA. But Wilkins was still Franklin’s boss, which meant that he got copies of her photographs. In January 1953, he showed one particularly telling image to Watson. Now Watson could immediately see in those images how DNA was shaped. He and Crick also got hold of a summary of Franklin’s unpublished research she wrote up for the Medical Research Council, which guided them further to their solution. Neither bothered to consult Franklin about using her hard-earned pictures. The Cambridge and King’s teams then negotiated a plan to publish a set of papers in Nature on April 25, 1953. Crick and Watson unveiled their model in a paper that grabbed most of the attention. Franklin and Gosling published their X-ray data in another paper, which seemed to readers to be a “me-too” effort. Franklin died of cancer five years later, while Crick, Watson, and Wilkins went on to share the Nobel prize in 1962. In his 1968 book, The Double Helix, Watson would cruelly caricature Franklin as a belligerent, badly dressed woman who couldn’t appreciate what was in her pictures. That bitter fallout is a shame, because these scientists had together discovered something of exceptional beauty. They had found a molecular structure that could make heredity possible.

The church of medicine has its own saintly patrons, the most prominent being Hypocrites who founded a new religion and its sacred oath and originated a new era of humanity. Then comes Paracelsus, the father of toxicology, who promoted herbal medicine, iatrochemistry and pharmacognosy. Next, Pasteur, the father of vaccines, who, like Moses, shepherded humanity away from the captivity of infectious diseases, led it towards the promised land of health and provided it with the tools for its salvation 8 (Clerc 2004: 7). There is Freud who founded a new sect within medicine— psychoanalysis (Cioffi 1998 [2010]; Rieff 1973) while Watson and Crick revealed to humanity the sacred mystery of life. Among these saints there are also martyrs, like the promoter of jogging Jim Fixx, who died of heart attack while running, or Rosalind Franklin, who died of cancer caused by her exposure to X-ray radiation.

Ironically, the modern era of molecular biology, and all the extraordinary DNA technology that it entails, arguably began with a physicist, specifically with the publication of Erwin Schrödinger’s book What is Life? in 1944. Schrödinger made two key points: first, that life somehow resists the universal tendency to decay, the increase in entropy (disorder) that is stipulated by the second law of thermodynamics; and second, that the trick to life’s local evasion of entropy lies in the genes. He proposed that the genetic material is an ‘aperiodic’ crystal, which does not have a strictly repeating structure, hence could act as a ‘code-script’ – reputedly the first use of the term in the biological literature. Schrödinger himself assumed, along with most biologists at the time, that the quasicrystal in question must be a protein; but within a frenzied decade, Crick and Watson had inferred the crystal structure of DNA itself.

Inside Hod Lipson’s Creative Machines Lab at Cornell University, fantastically shaped robots are learning to crawl and fly, probably even as you read this. One looks like a slithering tower of rubber bricks, another like a helicopter with dragonfly wings, yet another like a shape-shifting Tinkertoy. These robots were not designed by any human engineer but created by evolution, the same process that gave rise to the diversity of life on Earth. Although the robots initially evolve inside a computer simulation, once they look proficient enough to make it in the real world, solid versions are automatically fabricated by 3-D printing. These are not yet ready to take over the world, but they’ve come a long way from the primordial soup of simulated parts they started with. The algorithm that evolved these robots was invented by Charles Darwin in the nineteenth century. He didn’t think of it as an algorithm at the time, partly because a key subroutine was still missing. Once James Watson and Francis Crick provided it in 1953, the stage was set for the second coming of evolution: in silico instead of in vivo, and a billion times faster. Its prophet was a ruddy-faced, perpetually grinning midwesterner by the name of John Holland.

the greatest scientists from other fields—notably Francis Crick, who with James Watson and colleagues transformed how we think of life itself, through the discovery of the structure and significance of the DNA molecule.

Even in the less-obviously creative fields of hard science, LSD can be profoundly beneficial. In fact, it played a role in the two biggest discoveries in biology of the 20th century. Francis Crick, who discovered the double helix structure of DNA with James Watson, and Kary Mullis, who invented the polymerase chain reaction (PCR), had both taken the drug, and attributed some of their understanding and insights to it. Mullis has gone so far as to say: "would I have invented PCR if I hadn't taken LSD? I seriously doubt it ... [having taken LSD] I could sit on a DNA molecule and watch the polymers go by. I learnt that partly on psychedelic drugs.

Después de que en 1610 Galileo descubriera las lunas de Júpiter con su telescopio casero, sus críticos religiosos condenaron su nueva teoría centrada en el Sol afirmando que era un destronamiento del hombre. No sospechaban que ése no era más que un primer destronamiento. Cien años más tarde, el estudio de las capas sedimentarias llevado a cabo por el granjero escocés James Hutton tumbó el cálculo que había hecho la Iglesia de la edad de la Tierra, afirmando que era ochocientos mil años más antigua. No mucho después, Charles Darwin relegó a los seres humanos a una rama más del populoso reino animal. A principios del siglo XX, la mecánica cuántica alteró de manera irreparable nuestra idea del tejido de la realidad. En 1953, Francis Crick y James Watson descifraron la estructura del ADN, reemplazando el misterioso fantasma de la vida por algo que podemos anotar en secuencias de cuatro letras y almacenar en un ordenador. Y a lo largo del siglo pasado, la neurociencia ha demostrado que la mente consciente ya no es la que lleva el timón de nuestra vida. Apenas cuatrocientos años después de nuestra caída del centro del universo, hemos experimentado la caída del centro de nosotros mismos.

Scientists and engineers tend to divide their work into two large categories, sometimes described as basic research and directed research. Some of the most crucial inventions and discoveries of the modern world have come about through basic research—that is, work that was not directed toward any particular use. Albert Einstein’s picture of the universe, Alexander Fleming’s discovery of penicillin, Niels Bohr’s blueprint of the atomic nucleus, the Watson-Crick “double helix” model of DNA—all these have had enormous practical implications, but they all came out of basic research. There are just as many basic tools of modern life—the electric light, the telephone, vitamin pills, the Internet—that resulted from a clearly focused effort to solve a particular problem. In a sense, this distinction between basic and directed research encompasses the difference between science and engineering. Scientists, on the whole, are driven by the thirst for knowledge; their motivation, as the Nobel laureate Richard Feynman put it, is “the joy of finding things out.” Engineers, in contrast, are solution-driven. Their joy is making things work. The monolithic idea was an engineering solution. It worked around the tyranny of numbers by reducing the numbers to one: a complete circuit would consist of just one part—a single (“monolithic”) block of semiconductor material containing all the components and all the interconnections of the most complex circuit designs. The tangible product of that idea, known to engineers as the monolithic integrated circuit and to the world at large as the semiconductor chip, has changed the world as fundamentally as did the telephone, the light bulb, and the horseless carriage. The integrated circuit is the heart of clocks, computers, cameras, and calculators, of pacemakers and Palm Pilots, of deep-space probes and deep-sea sensors, of toasters, typewriters, cell phones, and Internet servers. The National Academy of Sciences declared the integrated circuit the progenitor of the “Second Industrial Revolution.” The first Industrial Revolution enhanced man’s physical prowess and freed people from the drudgery of backbreaking manual labor; the revolution spawned by the chip enhances our intellectual prowess and frees people from the drudgery of mind-numbing computational labor. A British physicist, Sir Ieuan Madlock, Her Majesty’s Chief Science Advisor, called the integrated circuit “the most remarkable technology ever to hit mankind.” A California businessman, Jerry Sanders, founder of Advanced Micro Devices, Inc., offered a more pointed assessment: “Integrated circuits are the crude oil of the eighties.” All

Although the nucleus might have been recognized by Antonie van Leeuwenhoek in the late 17th century, it was not until 1831 that it was reported as a specific structure in orchid epidermal cells by a Scottish botanist, Robert Brown (better known for recognizing ‘Brownian movement’ of pollen grains in water). In 1879, Walther Flemming observed that the nucleus broke down into small fragments at cell division, followed by re-formation of the fragments called chromosomes to make new nuclei in the daughter cells. It was not until 1902 that Walter Sutton and Theodor Boveri independently linked chromosomes directly to mammalian inheritance. Thomas Morgan’s work with fruit flies (Drosophila) at the start of the 20th century showed specific characters positioned along the length of the chromosomes, followed by the realization by Oswald Avery in 1944 that the genetic material was DNA. Some nine years later, James Watson and Francis Crick showed the structure of DNA to be a double helix, for which they shared the Nobel Prize in 1962 with Maurice Wilkins, whose laboratory had provided the evidence that led to the discovery. Rosalind Franklin, whose X-ray diffraction images of DNA from the Wilkins lab had been the key to DNA structure, died of cancer aged 37 in 1958, and Nobel Prizes are not awarded posthumously. Watson and Crick published the classic double helix model in 1953. The final piece in the jigsaw of DNA structure was produced by Watson with the realization that the pairing of the nucleotide bases, adenine with thymine and guanine with cytosine, not only provided the rungs holding the twisting ladder of DNA together, but also provided a code for accurate replication and a template for protein assembly. Crick continued to study and elucidate the base pairing required for coding proteins, and this led to the fundamental ‘dogma’ that ‘DNA makes RNA and RNA makes protein’. The discovery of DNA structure marked an enormous advance in biology, probably the most significant since Darwin’s publication of On the Origin of Species .

we point out at the start of every science class a very interesting fact: even the simplest textbooks written for secondary-school students are based on the achievements of the greatest names in science, such as Galileo, Newton, Darwin, Pasteur, Mendel, Curie, Watson, and Crick. If you think about it for a moment, this is truly surprising. One would expect the most important developments in science to be the most complex, but in fact, they are always the simplest.

Although molecular biology was not born in 1953 with the discovery of the structure of DNA by Watson and Crick, its elucidation has provided the molecular biologist with tools and techniques that have propelled the science forward. All the information required to make a human being is contained in a single cell. The molecules comprising this fertilized egg will organize the development, sustain the life, allow for the reproduction of, and ultimately execute the demise of an individual. Molecular biology is the study of the way in which molecules function to organize life. Remarkably, the same molecules and principles lie at the heart of all the life sciences, as they control the fundamental machinery of cells. The field of molecular biology concerns macromolecules such as nucleic acids, proteins, carbohydrates, and fats, and their interrelationships, that are essential for life itself.

FROM DETHRONEMENT TO DEMOCRACY After Galileo discovered the moons of Jupiter in his homemade telescope in 1610, religious critics decried his new sun-centered theory as a dethronement of man. They didn’t suspect that this was only the first dethronement of several. One hundred years later, the study of sedimentary layers by the Scottish farmer James Hutton toppled the Church’s estimate of the age of the Earth—making it eight hundred thousand times older. Not long afterward, Charles Darwin relegated humans to just another branch in the swarming animal kingdom. At the beginning of the 1900s, quantum mechanics irreparably altered our notion of the fabric of reality. In 1953, Francis Crick and James Watson deciphered the structure of DNA, replacing the mysterious ghost of life with something that we can write down in sequences of four letters and store in a computer. And over the past century, neuroscience has shown that the conscious mind is not the one driving the boat. A mere four hundred years after our fall from the center of universe, we have experienced the fall from the center of ourselves. In the first chapter we saw that conscious access to the machinery under the hood is slow, and often doesn’t happen at all. We then learned that the way we see the world is not necessarily what’s out there: vision is a construction of the brain, and its only job is to generate a useful narrative at our scales of interactions (say, with ripe fruits, bears, and mates).

Many of the great collaborations in history were between people who fully understood and internalized what the other was saying. The fathers of flight, Orville and Wilbur Wright; WWII leaders Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt; James Watson and Francis Crick, who codiscovered the structure of DNA; and John Lennon and Paul McCartney of the Beatles were all partners known for spending uninterrupted hours in conversation before they made their marks on history. Of course, they were all brilliant on their own, but it took a kind of mind meld to achieve what they did. This congruence happens to varying degrees between any two people who “click,” whether friends, lovers, business associates, or even between stand-up comedians and their audiences. When you listen and really “get” what another person is saying, your brain waves and those of the speaker are literally in sync.

The field of biology, particularly evolutionary biology, took a giant leap forward in 1953 with one of the most significant discoveries of the twentieth century: the molecular structure of DNA. This Nobel Prize–winning effort of Watson and Crick unraveled the mystery of how genetic information is encoded and transmitted through the double helix. Or did it? Even decades after this seminal event, scientists do not agree on the definition of what constitutes a gene.1 We are endowed with 22,500 genes; some scientists think that less than 2 percent are helpful, whereas others assert that more than 50 percent are. As a result, we do not know what most of our DNA—comprising more than six billion letters—does.

The field of biology, particularly evolutionary biology, took a giant leap forward in 1953 with one of the most significant discoveries of the twentieth century: the molecular structure of DNA. This Nobel Prize–winning effort of Watson and Crick unraveled the mystery of how genetic information is encoded and transmitted through the double helix. Or did it? Even decades after this seminal event, scientists do not agree on the definition of what constitutes a gene.1 We are endowed with 22,500 genes; some scientists think that less than 2 percent are helpful, whereas others assert that more than 50 percent are. As a result, we do not know what most of our DNA—comprising more than six billion letters—does. More surprisingly, even when there is agreement on the function of a particular bit of DNA, it is still a mystery how this DNA translates into a phenotype, or observable trait. The plain truth is that despite hundreds of millions of dollars being spent every year by dedicated researchers globally, we don’t understand how evolution works at the molecular level.2 And this is a good—no, great—thing.

And while each subsequent effort saw steep declines in cost, the price tags were still staggering. Craig Venter, the renegade entrepreneur who had taken on the public genome project in a race to be the first to sequence a human genome, sequenced his own genome at a cost of around $100 million. An anonymous Han Chinese man had been sequenced in 2008 for around $2 million. And James Watson, who shared the Nobel Prize for work with Francis Crick and Maurice Wilkins and who, together with Rosalind Franklin, elucidated the structure of DNA, had his genome sequenced by a group at Baylor College of Medicine in early 2008 for the comparatively modest sum of only $1 million.

Rosalind Franklin. She was instrumental in discovering the double helix in DNA, but it was two male colleagues, Crick and Watson, that got the Nobel Prize.

When Watson and Crick announced that they had discovered what they called ‘the secret of life’ in 1953, they were merely rediscovering something alchemists have always known.

Since James Watson’s and Francis Crick’s discovery of the double-helix structure of DNA in 1953,

As Andrew Kimbrell has noted, “When scientists James Watson and Francis Crick first described the double helix of DNA in 1953 it was considered a historic ‘discovery,’ which has been called ‘the greatest achievement of science in the twentieth century’ and ‘one of the epic discoveries in the history of scientific thought.’”4 From a critical Indigenous perspective, Watson and Crick were to genes what Columbus was to the Americas or Captain Cook was to Hawai‘i. Once Westerners discover and name a creation of akua, whether it be land or genes, they begin to utilize and develop it, and eventually they must devise ways to legally claim it as their own property.

A month after the Watson-Crick structure was published, Britain crowned a new queen and a British expedition conquered Mount Everest on the same day. Apart from a small piece in the News Chronicle, the double helix did not make the newspapers. Today most scientists consider it the most momentous discovery of the century, if not the millennium.

Copernicus taught us that the Universe does not revolve around the Earth. Darwin showed us that we are not so different from other apes. Watson, Crick and Franklin revealed that the same DNA code of life powers us and the simplest amoeba. And artificial intelligence will no doubt teach us that human intelligence is itself nothing special.

WE MAY TALK ABOUT WATSON AND CRICK’S DOUBLE-HELIX DISCOVERY IN SCIENCE CLASS, BUT BRITISH CHEMIST ROSALIND FRANKLIN IS THE ONE WHO REVEALED DNA’S STRUCTURE.

Hallowell writes: “Columbus was at play when it dawned on him that the world was round. Newton was at play in his mind when he saw the apple tree and suddenly conceived of the force of gravity. Watson and Crick were playing with possible shapes of the DNA molecule when they stumbled upon the double helix. Shakespeare played with iambic pentameter his whole life. Mozart barely lived a waking moment when he was not at play. Einstein’s thought experiments are brilliant examples of the mind invited to play.