The race to decode life

The second of the two 1953 Watson and Crick papers in Nature (May 30) was titled “Genetical Implications of the Structure of Deoxyribonucleic Acid,” but the genetical implication uppermost in their minds was not how DNA coded for proteins. Rather they emphasized that the structure solved “…one of the biological problems — the molecular basis of the template needed for genetic replication.” Perhaps the answer to how a DNA molecule could act as a carrier of genetic information was self-evident and it was dealt with in a single sentence: “it seems likely that the precise sequence of bases is the code which carries genetical information.”