“The Greatest Surprise for Everyone” — Notes on the 50th Anniversary of the Double Helix

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Abstract
“It is the molecule which has style, quite as much as the scientists,” Francis Crick wrote in 1974, for the 21st anniversary of the elucidation of the structure of deoxyribonucleic acid, DNA.1 Austerely elegant, stupendously parsimonious, and shocking in its explanatory power, the double helix pervades all thinking about the nature of the gene — the transmission and expression of hereditary characters. Max Delbrück said it, in a conversation at Cold Spring Harbor, New York, on a summer's day in 1972: “Nobody, absolutely nobody, until the day of the Watson–Crick structure (Figure 1), had thought that the specificity might be . . .