Friday 26 April 2013

Happy DNA Day!

It's 60 years to the day since the trio of Nature papers about the structure of DNA were published, including the famous 1953 Watson & Crick paper. The double helix has to be one of the most elegant and beautiful of all natural phenomena. The Exploratorium website has an annotated version of the Watson and Crick paper if you fancy a read. It's pretty short and contains one (or two) of the biggest understatements in biological history:
"This structure has novel features which are of considerable biological interest. ... It has not escaped our notice that the specific pairing we have postulated immediately suggests a possible copying mechanism for the genetic material."
Indeed!

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