Word: crick
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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James D. Watson, former professor of Biochemistry, and Francis Crick of Cambridge University in England, won the Nobel Prize in the early '60s for discovering that DNA exists as a "right- handed double helix," resembling a spiral staircase that turns clockwise...
David Dressler, professor of Biochemistry, said yesterday that for 25 years, the structure proposed by Watson and Crick has served as a "focal point for the successful elucidation of numerous aspects of genetics." The MIT finding may lead to new explanations of some genetic principles, although the discovery's real biological significance must still be determined, he added...
Dressler said that even if the left-handed structure is not proven to exist in natural DNA molecules, the discovery of a DNA structure different from the Watson-Crick model may have important implications...
Judson does not slight the Watson-Crick episode. But he also provides a broader landscape, carefully filling in details of the so-called phage group, a small band of mostly ex-physicists who decided to use bacteria-eating viruses as a kind of genetic scalpel; the virtually forgotten work of Rockefeller Institute's Oswald Avery; the painstaking efforts of scientists to explain exactly how DNA and its kin, RNA (for ribonucleic acid), performed their magic; and finally the patient toil of Britain's Max Perutz, who unraveled the structure and precise workings of the blood's oxygen...
...quenchable self-confidence." Biochemist Erwin Chargaff, bypassed by the DNA revolution, is "the man of mordant dissent." But in the main, the author is content to take the role of acolyte, bombarding his gifted tutors with questions, some incisive, others pointedly rhetorical. As Judson plays student to Nobel Laureates Crick and Perutz, so does the reader, who, if patient enough, can gain an understanding and appreciation of the century's most elusive science...