Coventina's History Thread: Discovery of DNA

Hello all!
Welcome back to the DU-tolerated History Thread!
I know it's been a long time.
I'm no longer going to make lofty promises of threads daily, but I will strive to be more regular going forward!

Today I'm talking about Deoxyribonucleid acid, or as we know it: DNA.

It is the "stuff" in the cell nucleus that contains a living organism's genetic information. Although scientists have known about DNA since the 1860s, no one knew what it looked like. Imagine trying to find your way around a building without knowing anything about its appearance, inside or outside. You might know it's made of brick, but what shape is it? Where are the stairs and the elevator? James Watson and Francis Crick wanted to answer those very same questions about DNA - the building blocks of life.

Watson and Crick were molecular biologists from the United States and Great Britain, respectively. In the 1950s, they built their first model of DNA from metal and wire at Cambridge University in England. Watson and Crick gathered information from all over the place. They attended lectures, read scientific papers, looked at X-rays, and did their own experiments before deciding that building a model was the best way to approach the challenge. Unfortunately, their model failed. It failed so badly that the head of their department told them to cease all DNA research. But the pair couldn't let it go.

A breakthrough came in 1953 when a competing scientist, also frustrated in trying to discover the structure of DNA, shared his work (and his partner's, without her knowledge) with Watson and Crick. The new insight caused them to take a huge leap in thought. it had been widely accepted that DNA probably had two strands that wrapped around each other like a staircase. This is the double helix. Watson and Crick theorized that one side of the strand wound upward and the other side downward, with matching chemicals (base pairs) holding the two helices together. Discovering how the four base pair chemicals - adenine with thymine and cytosine with guanine - fit together was the final step in unlocking the mystery.

The structure of DNA is one of the most important discoveries of the last 100 years. It has influenced everything from food to medicine to technology. In 1962, Watson, Crick, and Maurice Wilkins (the scientist who shared the work of his partner, Rosalind Franklin) won the Nobel Prize for Physiology / Medicine. Franklin did not receive the Nobel Prize, but only because the award is reserved for the living - Franklin had died four years earlier. Sadly, because of this, her contributions are largely ignored.

Well, because of that, hers is the only picture I'm going to feature today!