15.
Living with a Double Helix
Over
the next few days Watson and Crick assembled a large
model of the DNA structure, and were ready to announce
their discovery. Wilkins visited from London and offered
to compare the X-ray data with this new structure. A
few days later he 'phoned back to announce that both
he and Franklin agreed that their data was in strong
support of the double helix.
Both
laboratories agreed to publish their results simultaneously.
Watson and Crick wrote a paper on the structure of DNA,
while Wilkins and Franklin prepared two papers about
their X-ray photographs. All three articles were published
together in the journal Nature on 25th April,
1953.
In
1962 Watson, Crick and Wilkins received the Nobel Prize
for Physiology or Medicine "for their discoveries
concerning the molecular structure of nucleic acids
and its significance for information transfer in living
material". Sadly Rosalind Franklin could not share
in the prize. She had become ill with cancer in 1956,
and died two years later, before the prize was awarded.
Her essential role in the discovery of DNA's molecular
structure was never disputed.
Max
Perutz's team in the Cavendish grew rapidly after the
discovery. The year before Watson's arrival only four
molecular biologists were working in the Cavendish,
but only ten years later this number had grown to forty!
In 1962 the molecular biologists moved out of the Cavendish
to form the Medical Research Council Laboratory of Molecular
Biology, chaired by Perutz until his retirement in 1979.
At the start of 2001 there were over four hundred molecular
biologists in the MRC Laboratory.
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