Famous First Words #7: The Double Helix -- Watson and Crick

Famous First Words is a recurring LabKitty feature in which we take a look at the opening line of an historic scientific article.

It was a saga worthy of a Mexican soap opera (or Mexican wrestling) albeit no spandex and more modest bosoms. The egos, the backstabbing, the sexism, the big shot who grabs too soon for the brass ring and goes down in flames, paving the way for the little guys to snatch the glory (see The Double Helix for all the gory details). Watson and Crick didn't discover DNA nor did they posit it's role in heredity. They weren't even the first ones kicking around the helix idea. But they were the first to publish a detailed account of its structure and get it right. Thus were the floodgates opened on an entire field of molecular biology. No Watson and Crick, no codon dictionary, no antivirals, no Dolly, no PCR, no Human Genome project. Their discovery really does deserve the "watershed" moniker.

Both of them took their fame out for a ride after the fact, with Crick eventually landing at the Salk Institute where he spent the rest of his career making wacky claims about how the brain works and Watson settling in at Harvard and from time to time inflaming the lay press by saying things people don't want to think about (he also co-wrote a couple of bitchin' molecular biology textbooks).

Here's how it all began:

Molecular structure of Nucleic Acids:
A structure for deoxyribose nucleic acid
J. Watson and F. Crick Nature 171:737 (1953)

We wish to suggest a structure for the salt of deoxyribose nucleic acid (DNA).