Audrey Borus - James Watson, Francis Crick, Rosalind Franklin, and Maurice Wilkins: The Scientists Who Revealed the Structure of DNA

In the Beginning

T he 1950s was a time of marked advances in science. Vaccines were being developed, which allowed people to live longer, healthier lives. Technology was booming. With the advent of the transistor, radios had gone from being big boxes to small handheld devices. Plastic production hit an all-time high. In this climate, one of the biggest and far-reaching revelations would be discovered: the structure and function of DNA.

Francis Crick

Francis Harry Crick was born June 8, 1918, in Northampton, England, into a hard-working, middle-class family. He had an inquiring mind at a young age, so his parents gifted him with a set of the Childrens Encyclopedia. A single volume contained a mix of entries from art, mythology, science, history, and literature. Crick remembered being entranced by it all, but he was particularly fond of reading about science and decided early on that he wanted to be a scientist.

Francis Harry Crick was one of the scientists who worked to reveal the chemical composition of DNA, a finding that would change the course of the biological sciences and medicine.

And for Crick, this was enough to get the ball rolling. His supervisor at the Admiralty put him in touch with Maurice Willkins, who had a similar scientific background and was making the shift into the biological sciences. The two began a friendship.

Schrdingers What Is Life ?

Viennese scientist Erwin Schrdinger (18871961) is known as the father of quantum mechanics. At the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, Schrdinger wrote and delivered a series of lectures titled What Is Life? In these lectures, which were later published as a book, Schrdinger questioned why biology was considered a completely separate science from physics or chemistry. He believed living organisms should be studied in terms of their molecular and atomic structure and that living and nonliving worlds were governed by the same rules of physics. Wilkins, Watson, and Crick all read What Is Life? and each maintained that it affected the way they began to think about biology.

James Watson

James Dewey Watson was born on April 6, 1928, in Chicago, Illinois. Despite having lived through the Great Depression and World War II, his family had enough money to live comfortably. He describes his family as always [rooting] for [President] Franklin [Delano Roosevelt] and his New Deals promise to rescue the downtrodden from the heartless grasp of unregulated capitalism. He started at the Laboratory School of the University of Chicago, but when tuition became beyond his parents Depression salary, he went to the local Horace Mann Grammar School. This in no way disadvantaged him. By the time he was fifteen, he applied for and was accepted at the University of Chicago on a scholarship. He finished his undergraduate biology degree in three years, at only eighteen years old, although he didnt make particularly high marks in science. He applied to Harvard and the California Institute of Technology for postgraduate work and was turned down. However, in 1947, Watson got a research fellowship at Indiana University, where he earned his doctorate in biochemistry in 1950. Then at twenty-one years old, he went to Copenhagen, Denmark.