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Double Helix: How an Image Sparked the Discovery of the Secret of Life

Double Helix: How an Image Sparked the Discovery of the Secret of Life book cover
Chapter One GLIMPSE OF A PHOTO James Watson carried a document with him on the 50-mile 80-kilometer train trip from Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge England to London The paper had already traveled more than 5,000 miles 8,047 km from California before arriving in his hands that late January day in 1953 He could not wait to share the news it held The American biologist hurried along the wide courtyard of King’s College in London where a German bomb had destroyed underground labs just over a decade earlier World War II had demanded the skills of many scientists including those of Maurice Wilkins the friend he was heading to see in the King’s College physics labs Wilkins had worked to improve radar then traveled to Berkeley California to help develop the first nuclear weapons But by the end of the war he felt very disgusted with the dropping of two bombs on civilian centers in Japan 1 and returned to England and to King’s College to study something new After earning undergraduate and graduate degrees in the United States James Watson worked with scientists in England Inside the physics labs Wilkins peered into cells deep inside the nucleus to a molecule called deoxyribonucleic acid DNA for short No one fully understood the shape or construction of the molecule Many other scientists were more interested in studying the cell’s proteins After all they are complex and direct nearly every task in the human body Yet some scientists including Wilkins hoped that finding the simple