III.

Watson Teams with Crick

At Cambridge, Watson met Francis Crick, who was working on his doctoral thesis on protein structure. Both men were keenly interested in studying the structure of DNA and from 1951 to 1953, Watson and Crick collaborated on their DNA studies, while continuing independent research.

To help them in their research, the pair asked Wilkins and British physical chemist Rosalind Franklin at King’s College, London, to perform X-ray diffraction analysis of the DNA molecule. After many tries, Watson and Crick used the X-ray diffraction patterns created by Franklin to develop a model for the three-dimensional structure of DNA. The model depicted DNA as two complementary strands twisted into a double helix. The famous photograph of the two men next to their double helix model has become an icon of molecular biology.

Watson and Crick broke the news of their discovery in the British science journal Nature on April 25, 1953. The Watson-Crick model, as it became known, was of momentous importance in biology. The model enabled scientists to understand and describe living things for the first time in terms of the structure and interaction of molecules. American biochemist Arthur Kornberg provided experimental proof for their model in 1956. The discovery of the structure of DNA set the stage for rapid advances in molecular biology over the next 50 years.