The Double Helix

Fülszöveg

"It is a strange model and embodies severai unusual features. However, since DNA is an unusual substance, we are not hesitant in being bold." Thus quietly, Jim Watson, aged twenty-four, wrote from Cambridge to a friend in the States, one month before the public announcement in April 1953 of a discovery that many scientists now call the most significant since Mendel's. DNA is the molecule of heredity, and to know its structure and method of reproduction enables science to know how genetic directions are written and transmitted, how the forms of life are ordered from one generation to the next. The search for this molecular structure is the story told here, in a book that alsó has its unusual features as well as a measure of boldness. The work was done between the fali of 1951 and April 1953, and the scientific paper announcing the discovery was published in Nature immediately. In 1962 the Nobel Prize for Medicine and Physiology was awarded to Francis H. C. Crick, James D. Watson, and... Tovább

Fülszöveg

"It is a strange model and embodies severai unusual features. However, since DNA is an unusual substance, we are not hesitant in being bold." Thus quietly, Jim Watson, aged twenty-four, wrote from Cambridge to a friend in the States, one month before the public announcement in April 1953 of a discovery that many scientists now call the most significant since Mendel's. DNA is the molecule of heredity, and to know its structure and method of reproduction enables science to know how genetic directions are written and transmitted, how the forms of life are ordered from one generation to the next. The search for this molecular structure is the story told here, in a book that alsó has its unusual features as well as a measure of boldness. The work was done between the fali of 1951 and April 1953, and the scientific paper announcing the discovery was published in Nature immediately. In 1962 the Nobel Prize for Medicine and Physiology was awarded to Francis H. C. Crick, James D. Watson, and Maurice H. F. Wilkins, the three men who almost a decade earlier had worked together, merging data from chemistry, physics, and biology, to solve the structure of DNA-Crick and Watson on the building of a hypothetical model that would conform in all its parts to what Wilkins' X-ray pictures had already shown of the molecuje. The interplay of ideas, temperaments, and circumstances was an especially fortuitous one, since the result was something that, in Watson's words, was too pretty not to be true: the double helix. Watson shows us how this particular piece of science was worked out, but along the way (continued on back flap) Vissza