Fifty Years with Double-Stranded RNA
The scientist who discovered hybridization and the "other" double helix describes what it meant to biology.
By Alexander Rich
Fifty-two years ago I was venturing to the basement of Cal Tech chemistry with some regularity, looking at nucleic-acid diffraction data using the school's admittedly primitive fiber X-ray facilities. My postdoctoral advisor at the time, Linus Pauling, had been interested in finding the structure of DNA, but Watson and Crick had largely eclipsed that effort. Now, collaborating with Jim Watson, who had returned from Cambridge, I was taken with a challenge put forth in his famed double-helix manuscript.1
In their 1953 publication on the DNA double helix, Watson and Crick stated: "It is probably impossible to form this structure with ribose, instead of deoxyribose." The reason: The 2' hydroxyl on each ribose would create a Van der Waals clash. But the question remained. Could the molecule ...
