Word: cricks
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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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 a task so formidable that it had stymied one of the world's most celebrated chemists, Linus Pauling. Watson, for his part, 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...
...Watson himself produced a highly irreverent, gossipy bestseller, The Double Helix, which revealed the human story behind the discovery of DNA's structure: the bickering, the academic rivalries, even the deceits that were practiced to win the great prize. Out of Pauling's earlier work, Watson and Crick got the idea that the extremely long and complicated DNA molecule might take the shape of a helix, or spiral. From the X-ray crystallography laboratory at King's College in London, where Biochemist Maurice Wilkins was also investigating the molecule's structure, they quietly obtained unpublished X-ray data...
...limitless information-storage system, like the memory bank of a computer. In addition, because the bases were chemically complementary?that is, A paired off only with T, and C only with G?one side of the staircase was in effect a genetic mirror image of the other. Watson and Crick quickly recognized from the structure of their model how DNA worked. But their 900-word announcement in Nature, the international weekly published in Britain, concluded with one of the more coy statements in scientific literature. "It has not escaped our notice," they said, "that the specific pairing we have postulated...
...Once he obtained enough of the enzyme, he placed it in a test-tube brew with a bit of natural DNA, one of whose strands was incomplete, the four bases (A, T, C, G) and a few other off-the-shelf chemicals. True to his expectations?and the Watson-Crick theory?the incomplete segment picked up its complementary nucleotides from the brew to form a complete double helix...