They Changed the World: Crick & Watson - The Discovery of DNA

Book excerpt: Since the dawn of civilization, we have searched for answers to what makes life possible, and in the mid-twentieth century we found them through the persistent efforts of James Watson and Francis Crick. Although the groundwork for the discovery had already been laid out, it was Watson and Crick's derivation of the three-dimensional, double-helical model for the structure of DNA that solved the final piece of the puzzle and won them the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1962. That is only a single moment of triumph, though, and the journey they took to get there was a long and arduous one. Find out how Crick and Watson beat their rivals to unlock the secrets of life itself as they unravelled the mystery behind DNA and changed not only science but the world we live in.