Life is just a four letter code
Crick and Watson's stroke of genius was to imagine a double-helix structure, like a twisted ladder. This explained the known chemical properties of DNA and the results from Franklin and Wilkins' X-ray experiments.
The double-helix structure explained how the molecule could produce identical copies of itself. It also suggested how the 'rungs' of the twisted ladder, made of pairs of chemical bases (adenine, thymine, guanine and cytosine), might carry a message in code. But back in 1953 this was all guesswork - it took 11 years to prove!
| 
|
