Sixty years ago, on April 25, 1953, Watson and Crick’s paper, “A Structure for Deoxyribose Nucleic Acid,” appeared in Nature. In little over one page they describe the now iconic double-helical structure of DNA, concluding with the colossal understatement: “It has not escaped our notice that the specific pairing we have postulated immediately suggests a possible copying mechanism for the genetic material.” Five weeks later, in the same journal, Watson and Crick published a more detailed description of the structure ending in the words: “We feel that our proposed structure for deoxyribonucleic acid may help to solve one of the fundamental biological problems—the molecular basis of the template needed for genetic replication. The hypothesis we are suggesting is that the template is the pattern of ...
