DNA Anniversary

The answer is A: James Watson, of the famed Watson and Francis Crick team that discovered the DNA double helix, received his doctorate in zoology from Indiana University in 1950. He went on to do his postdoctoral fellowship at Cambridge, where he met Crick.

Fifty years ago, in April 1953, James Watson and Francis Crick described the three-dimensional structure of DNA in a report published in a British science journal called Nature. They used paper cutouts and metal scraps from a machine shop to develop their model. Their model revealed that DNA’s structure is a double helix and the two strands of the double helix run in opposite directions. They also revealed that the two strands of the helix are formed of the sugar and phosphate parts of nucleotides which are the chemical building blocks of the DNA. Watson and Crick’s description of DNA’s structure solved one of biology’s greatest mysteries by revealing how genetic traits are passed on from one generation to the next and began the modern era of medical research in genetics.

Watson, now the president of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in Cold Spring Harbor in the state of New York, received a Nobel Prize for his work in 1962.

Resources:

An extensive and interactive history of DNA.

Learn about the Human Genome Project.

Read a biography of James Watson.