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Previous Volume 348:1712-1714 April 24, 2003 Number 17 Next

	Since this article has no abstract, we have provided an extract of the first 100 words of the full text and any section headings.

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"It is the molecule which has style, quite as much as the scientists," Francis Crick wrote in 1974, for the 21st anniversary of the elucidation of the structure of deoxyribonucleic acid, DNA.¹ Austerely elegant, stupendously parsimonious, and shocking in its explanatory power, the double helix pervades all thinking about the nature of the gene — the transmission and expression of hereditary characters. Max Delbrück said it, in a conversation at Cold Spring Harbor, New York, on a summer's day in 1972: "Nobody, absolutely nobody, until the day of the Watson–Crick structure (Figure 1), had thought that the specificity . . . [Full Text of this Article]

Source Information

From the Center for History of Recent Science, George Washington University, Washington, D.C.

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