Even the greatest scientific discoveries come with an element of the mundane. A humble paperclip was biophysicist Raymond Gosling's choice. Late one night in May 1952, in a chemistry lab in London, the PhD student wrapped DNA around a paperclip to keep the molecule's fibres stretched taut in front of an X-ray source so that he could analyse their structure. The result was the celebrated 'photograph 51' - the image that told James Watson that DNA strands curl around each other like a twisted ladder, and that the specific pairings in the rungs are key to the mechanism of inheritance.
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