Word: dna
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...Watson attends Maurice Wilkins' lecture on X-ray crystal-lography of DNA...
...Watson and Wilkins attend a seminar by Rosalind Franklin. Watson fails to remembers correctly key data about the water content of DNA...
...DNA must be a helix after all, and on a cold train ride back to Cambridge, Watson decided that two helical sugar-phosphate backbones made more sense than three. "Thus by the time I had cycled back to college and climbed over the back gate, I had decided to build two-chain models. Francis would have to agree. Even though he was a physicist, he knew that important biological objects came in pairs...
...were the two backbones on the inside of DNA or on the outside? Inside was a lot more straightforward; with the attached bases pointing outward, whatever code they might carry would be easily accessible. There seemed no chemically viable way to parse it, however, although Watson spent several days trying. Finally, he writes, "as I took apart a particularly repulsive backbone-centered molecule, I decided that no harm could come from spending a few days building backbone-out models." This would raise the tricky question of how to pack strings of bases against one another. But Watson put aside that...
...scientists learned several things. First, it was O.K. with Wilkins if they proceeded with their model building (a good thing, since they had already started and had no intention of stopping now). More important, they evidently also learned that the King's group had prepared a report on its DNA studies for the Medical Research Council, which funded the work. It wasn't a confidential document, so Watson and Crick got hold of a copy. In it were some more crucial clues, including the fact that DNA had a particular type of structural symmetry that implied that the molecule...