Science: Commemorating a Revolution

Watson and Crick are reunited to mark an epic event

The article was only 900 words long, but its contents helped usher in a revolution. With bland understatement, James Watson, then 25, a freshly minted Ph.D. in zoology from Indiana University, and Francis Crick, a 36-year-old dropout from physics who had developed a belated interest in biochemistry, announced the solution to a puzzle that had stymied the scientific world. Though neither was especially equipped by training or experience for so challenging a task, they had unraveled the structure of deoxyribonucleic acid, or DNA, the...

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