Word: crick
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...dashed out of a side door of Cambridge University's Cavendish Laboratory, cut across Free School Lane and ducked into the Eagle, a pub where generations of Cambridge scientists have met to gossip about experiments and celebrate triumphs. Over drinks, James D. Watson, then 24, and Francis Crick, 36, talked excitedly, Crick's booming voice damping out conversations among other Eagle patrons. When friends stopped to ask what the commotion was all about, Crick did not mince words. "We," he announced exultantly, "have discovered the secret of life...
Inspired by these experiments, Watson, then a young Ph.D. in biology from Indiana University, decided to take a crack at the complex structure of DNA itself. The same thought struck Crick, a physicist turned biologist who was preparing for his doctorate at Cambridge. Neither man was particularly well equipped to undertake so formidable a task. Watson was deficient in chemistry, crystallography and mathematics. Crick, on the other hand, was almost totally ignorant of genetics. But together, in less than two years of work at Cambridge, these two spirited young scientists showed how it is possible to win a Nobel Prize...
...discovering DNA's now famous double-helical, or spiral-staircase, architecture, they also suggested how the magic molecule works: the two sides of the helix unzip, so that each can act as a template for making an exact copy of the original genetic material. Thus Watson and Crick not only described the three-dimensional geometry of DNA, which forms the genes in all living things, but also showed how it passes its message from one generation to the next...
...scientific journal Nature, a star-studded group gathered in Boston to commemorate an event that has been compared to the appearance of Darwin's Origin of Species or Einstein's papers on relativity. For three days, speaker after speaker, among them five Nobel laureates including Watson and Crick, talked eloquently about recent findings of the biological revolution...
...highlight of the conference, however, was a rare joint appearance by Watson and Crick. Both looked appropriately oracular: Watson with his aureole of thinning hair, Crick with a rim of silver. Still, there were flashes of the brash biochemists who had once electrified the scientific world. Watson displayed the pointed wit that he employed so deftly in his gossipy, irreverent 1968 history, The Double Helix (it began with the line "I have never seen Francis Crick in a modest mood...