The Secret of Life: The DNA Double Helix
1953 · event
On 28 February 1953, Francis Crick walked into a Cambridge pub and announced, with slight exaggeration, and no exaggeration at all, that he and James Watson had found "the secret of life." Their double helix, published that April in a paper of barely 900 words, explained how every living thing copies itself.
The key evidence, the X-ray image called Photo 51, came from Rosalind Franklin, whose data was used without her knowledge and whose early death excluded her from the Nobel Prize. Her name has moved, slowly and rightly, toward the centre of the story.
Everything followed from that twisted ladder: genetic medicine, DNA fingerprinting, the sequenced human genome, ancestry tests that reunite families on platforms like this one. Four letters, A, T, G, C, turned out to be the alphabet in which every memory of every ancestor is physically written.