James Watson remembers cringing when his colleague Francis Crick
announced to regulars at the Eagle, a pub in Cambridge, England, that
they had discovered "the secret of life." True, the onetime
ornithologist and the former physicist had created a plausible model for
the structure of DNA that morning. If they were right, biologists would
finally understand how parents pass characteristics on to their
children—not only hair and eye color but every aspect of how the
human body is built and how it operates. Watson, at left in photo, and
Crick would have solved the mysteries of heredity and of evolution, all
in one shot.
But they also might have been wrong, as they had been a
year and a half earlier, when the two rookies had made some dumb
mistakes. Even Linus Pauling, the world's greatest chemist, had blown
his own "solution" to DNA a couple of months before. So while their
double-helix model seemed to make biochemical sense and agreed with what
was already known, a wiser man might have toned down his rhetoric.
The fact that double helix and Watson and Crick are familiar to just
about every schoolchild, though, makes it clear that DNA was every bit
as important as Crick thought. Not only did it explain heredity, but it
would also lead to such practical applications as DNA forensics in law
enforcement, testing for genetic diseases and the development of an
entire biotechnology industry. With the recent completion of the Human
Genome Project, it could radically change the way medicine is practiced
over the next few decades. Crick's bold assertion was, if anything,
stunningly accurate.
TIME Cover
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