A Twist Of Fate

On Feb. 28, 1953, Francis Crick walked into the Eagle pub in Cambridge, England, and announced that he and James Watson had "found the secret of life." At least that's what Watson remembers; Crick's memory is different. The exact words don't matter that much because the fact is, they had done it. Earlier that day, the two scientists had pieced together the correct solution to a problem that researchers around the world were racing to solve. They had built a model of deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) that showed by its very structure how DNA could be everything they fiercely believed it to be: the carrier of the genetic code and thus the key molecule of heredity, developmental biology and evolution. Watson and Crick weren't necessarily the smartest scientists in the contest (though they were plenty smart). They weren't the most experienced; their track records in this area of science, in fact, were essentially nonexistent. They didn't have the best equipment. They didn't even know much biochemistry.

But despite these dismal odds, they made a discovery that in the half-century since has transformed science, medicine and much of modern life--though the full impact has yet to be felt. The tale of how this unlikely pair solved the most basic mystery of molecular biology is a reminder that brilliant minds and top-notch training aren't necessarily enough to penetrate the secrets of nature. You also need resilience, dogged persistence, plus a fair amount of luck--and as Watson inadvertently proved with the 1968 best seller The Double Helix, his controversial inside account of the discovery, a bit of arrogance doesn't hurt.

By the time Watson arrived in Cambridge in the fall of 1951, the brash and brilliant 23-year-old was obsessed with DNA. He had originally set out to become a naturalist (since childhood, he had had an interest in birds), but during his third year at the University of Chicago, Watson read a book titled What Is Life?, by Erwin Schrodinger, a founder of quantum physics. Stepping boldly outside his field of expertise, Schrodinger argued that one of life's essential features is the storage and transmission of information--that is, a genetic code that passes from parent to child. And because it had to be both complex and compact enough to fit inside a single cell, this code had to be written at the molecular level.

Impressed by these arguments, Watson switched from birds to genetics and went to Indiana University in 1947 to study viruses, the simplest form of life on the planet and thus the one in which the code might be especially easy to find. By then, scientists had strong evidence that Schrodinger's genetic code was carried by DNA, thanks to a series of brilliant experiments on pneumococcal bacteria, first by Fred Griffith of the British Health Ministry and later by Oswald Avery at the Rockefeller Institute (now Rockefeller University) in New York City.