To celebrate the 50th anniversary of Watson and Crick's discovery, TIME 's cover story looks at the scientific breakthroughs since 1953. TIME will also host a three-day conference, starting Feb. 19, in Monterey, Calif., called "The Future of Life," where the world's pre-eminent scientists, including Nobel laureate James Watson, will interact with ethicists, religious leaders, activists, academics, journalists and venture capitalists, for a provocative dialogue about biotechnology and its implications.
In an interview with Lemonick, Watson discusses how their discovery was met with "Almost total silence. The number of references to the original papers was essentially zero until the 1960s. People waited for the explanation of how DNA duplicated itself and how its code was turned into proteins before they fully accepted our structure. They didn't understand that it was simply too good not to be true. That's one reason we didn't get the Nobel for nine years," he tells TIME.
The more scientists learn about the way we age, the more they wonder why we have to, TIME's Nancy Gibbs writes. With the help of the code book, maybe scientists will one day turn our bodies into repair shops, learn how to control the genes that break and those that fix, so that our lives, like the immortal molecule Watson and Crick deconstructed 50 years ago, go on and on, TIME reports.
Looking at the future of life, TIME asks leaders in the field what advances they see coming:
James Watson
President, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
"The next century will bring together biology and psychology. We may need science to save us from our human nature. Food without fat -- it's like sex without having babies, and you know how great a revolution that triggered."
David Baltimore
President, California Institute of Technology
"We'll have cellular therapies -- the use of cells, either genetically engineered or natural -- to treat disease. Drugs will be more specific, more powerful, and they will come from a much deeper knowledge of the relevant biology. They won't be shots in the dark, as some are today."
Francis Collins
Director, National Human Genome Research Institute
"We will have individualized preventive medical care based on our own predicted risk of disease as assessed by looking at our DNA. By then each of us will have had our genomes sequenced because it will cost less than $100 to do that. And this information will be part of our medical record." Matt Ridley
Author of Genome: The Autobiography of a Species in 23 Chapters
"We will slow down the aging process dramatically. My great-grandchildren might live to 150 and not look very old at the end of it. The social and economic consequences will be striking. Careers would potentially go on forever, and there's no particular reason why people should retire." TIME's cover package is online now at TIME.com.