Word: helix
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Then, unexpectedly, he struck out when he proposed an implausible, three-chain helix for DNA. Several months later, in Cambridge, England, Francis Crick and I, apprehensive that Linus might bat again, found the double helix. Why Linus failed to hit this home run will never be known. His wife Ava Helen is said to have told Linus that he should have worked harder. I believe the decade following World War II may have had too many agonizing moments for the Pauling family...
...Francis Crick walked into the Eagle pub in Cambridge, England, and, as James Watson later recalled, announced that "we had found the secret of life." Actually, they had. That morning, Watson and Crick had figured out the structure of deoxyribonucleic acid, DNA. And that structure--a "double helix" that can "unzip" to make copies of itself--confirmed suspicions that DNA carries life's hereditary information...
...until decades later, in the age of genetic engineering, would the Promethean power unleashed that day become vivid. But from the beginning, the Watson and Crick story had traces of hubris. As told in Watson's classic memoir, The Double Helix, it was a tale of boundless ambition, impatience with authority and disdain, if not contempt, for received opinion. ("A goodly number of scientists," Watson explained, "are not only narrow-minded and dull but also just stupid.") Yet the Watson and Crick story is also one of sublime harmony, an example, as a colleague put it, of "that marvelous resonance...
...work." And her role didn't end there. Her critique of an early Watson and Crick theory had sent them back to the drawing board, and her notebooks show her working toward the solution until they found it; she had narrowed the structure down to some sort of double helix. But she never employed a key tool--the big 3-D molecular models that Watson and Crick were fiddling with at Cambridge...
JAMES D. WATSON, who contributed an essay on why genetic engineers must ignore the naysayers and forge ahead, is famous even among those who barely made it through high school biology for his and Francis Crick's 1953 discovery that DNA molecules arrange themselves in a double helix. That breakthrough earned them a Nobel Prize and made it possible to trace at the molecular level how cells organize hereditary information. In October, Watson drove in from the Long Island, N.Y., Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, where he has worked for nearly three decades, to speak to TIME's reporters and editors...