Science: Commemorating a Revolution

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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 basic molecule of heredity.

In doing so, these two very junior scientific researchers at England's Cambridge University had beaten out some of the giants of biochemistry, including Caltech's future Nobel prizewinner, Linus Pauling. More important, in discovering DNA's now famous double-helical, or spiral-staircase, architecture, they also suggested how the magic molecule works: the two sides of the helix unzip, so that each can act as a template for making an exact copy of the original genetic material. Thus Watson and Crick not only described the three-dimensional geometry of DNA, which forms the genes in all living things, but also showed how it passes its message from one generation to the next.

Last week, 30 years after the publication of their stunning report in the scientific journal Nature, a star-studded group gathered in Boston to commemorate an event that has been compared to the appearance of Darwin's Origin of Species or Einstein's papers on relativity. For three days, speaker after speaker, among them five Nobel laureates including Watson and Crick, talked eloquently about recent findings of the biological revolution.

M.I.T.'s Alexander Rich spoke of his discovery of so-called lefthanded or "Z" DNA, which twists bafflingly in the direction opposite that of a normal molecule; Rich indicated that this seeming oddity may play a significant role in switching genes off or on, thereby allowing a cell to develop into one that is different from its neighbor. Biologist Mark Ptashne of Harvard discussed the activity of small proteins that somehow attach themselves to the coils of DNA and control how the molecule replicates. Nobel Laureates David Baltimore of M.I.T. and Howard Temin of the University of Wisconsin reported on the use of viruses, which are little more than coils of nucleic acid wrapped in protein, to transfer new DNA or its molecular cousin, RNA (for ribonucleic acid), into bacterial cells. In the process, the cells are genetically transformed.

The highlight of the conference, however, was a rare joint appearance by Watson and Crick. Both looked appropriately oracular: Watson with his aureole of thinning hair, Crick with a rim of silver. Still, there were flashes of the brash biochemists who had once electrified the scientific world. Watson displayed the pointed wit that he employed so deftly in his gossipy, irreverent 1968 history, The Double Helix (it began with the line "I have never seen Francis Crick in a modest mood").