The Double Helix:
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This video tells the story of how Watson and Crick discovered the structure of DNA. (17 min long)
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James Watson's take on how he and Francis Crick discovered the structure of DNA. (21 min long)
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Summary:
Drs. James Watson and Francis Crick's structural model of DNA that they submitted to Nature in 1953 that led to the illumination of how genetic material is replicated and divided among offspring, launching all of modern molecular biology. This discovery had a major impact on biology, particularly in the field of genetics.
However much credit is due to Rosalind Franklin's Crystal structure Photo 51 that determined the double helix shape, and for which she never received due credit for. Franklin was using X-ray crystallography (a method for investigating molecular structure by observing the patterns formed by X-rays shot through a crystal of the substance) to understand the structure of DNA before well before Watson and Crick published their findings. Franklin would help launch modern molecular virology as well, before dying of ovarian cancer at only 37. Watson and Crick based their molecular model of the DNA double helix on data that had been collected by researchers in several other laboratories. They were the first to put together all of the scattered fragments of information that were required to produce a successful molecular model of DNA. Much of the data that were used by Crick and Watson came from unpublished work by Maurice Wilkins, Rosalind Franklin, A.R. Stokes, and H.R. Wilson at King's College London in the University of London. By 1962, when Watson, Crick, and Wilkins won the Nobel Prize for physiology/medicine, Franklin had died. The Nobel Prize only goes to living recipients, and can only be shared among three winners. Were she alive, would Rosalind Franklin have been included in the prize? |
The structure of DNA as discovered by Watson and Crick.
By Zephyris (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons] 
Photograph 51 (Franklin & Gosling, Nature, 1953)
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