Double Helix

Essay by prasanthUniversity, Bachelor'sA, July 2004

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A strong drive to succeed and the ability to be in the right place at the right time may be common features of successful people. Despite the best efforts of scientists, some discoveries they make are the purely result of serendipity, an unexpected result of an experiment or an accidental discovery or breakthrough. This is not to say that scientists wait around for something to happen. Usually, the unexpected discoveries occur as the result of curiosity and a desire to understand how the world works. Sometimes being the in the right place at the right time is enough to propel a curious person into the spotlight as a discoverer, developer, or inventor.

For instance, Watson joined Francis Crick in bio-molecular research at Cambridge in 1951. Together, Watson and Crick attempted to determine the chemical structure of living matter. When their initial research failed to produce results, the directors of the laboratory ordered them to end their investigation, but they continued their work in secret and.

On Feb. 28, 1953, Francis Crick walked into the Eagle pub in Cambridge, England, and, as James Watson later recalled, announced that "we had found the secret of life." Actually, they had. That morning, Watson and Crick had figured out the structure of deoxyribonucleic acid, DNA. And that structure, a "double helix" that can "unzip" to make copies of itself, confirmed suspicions that DNA carries life's hereditary information. In this way, each molecule of DNA is able to create two identical copies of it self. . The two scientists had determined the structure of the molecule deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA), of which all living matter is made. In June they published their findings in the British science journal Nature. The article created a sensation.

The initials DNA and the elegant model of the double helix...