Happy Anniversary
Fifty years after Watson and Crick's insight, scientists continue to take a close look at DNA's double helix
By John Travis
On April 25, 1953, a brief research paper appeared in the British scientific journal Nature. Fifty years later, it’s one of the most famous publications of all time and often considered the start of the molecular biology and genetics revolution that continues today. In that report, two young scientists at Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge, England, proposed what they called a “radically different” structure for DNA, the material that scientists of the time had recently concluded stored an organism’s genetic information. The pair argued that the DNA molecule resembles a spiral staircase. In the proposed arrangement, two strands are twisted together and connected at each step by a pair of so-called chemical bases, one jutting off each strand.
Such a structure hinted at the solution to another major riddle of biology: how a dividing cell copies its DNA so each daughter cell gets identical genetic information. The two strands could simply unwind, separate, and each make a new opposing strand according to the string of chemical bases it carries.