Word: cricks
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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...
...molecular biology's leap into prominence has been amply documented. In 1953, at Britain's venerable Cambridge University, two brash young scientists named James Watson and Francis Crick made a discovery comparable to the fissioning of the atom or Darwin's publication of Origin of Species. In a matter of months, after cribbing clues from associates and competitors, Watson, then 25, and Crick, 36, cracked what they grandiosely called "the secret of life": they unraveled the long, spiraling architecture of the DNA molecule, a feat that suggested how heredity truly worked...
...told the story better than Watson himself. His bestselling 1968 memoir, The Double Helix, was so witty and candid that Crick regarded it as an invasion of privacy. Why another traverse of the same terrain? Because, as Author Horace Freeland Judson makes clear in his extraordinary lay history of molecular biology, there is far more to DNA than Watson and Crick. Indeed, molecular biology's beginnings involved so many characters and subplots, so many false starts and flashes of insight, that it has all the elements of an epic detective story...
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...