Who said 'helix'?

摘要

The celebrated model of DNA, put forward in this journal in 1953 by James Watson and Francis Crick, is compellingly simple, both in its form and its functional implications (see www.nature.comature/dna50). At a stroke it resolved the puzzle inherent in the X-ray diffraction photograph (see right) shown by Maurice Wilkins at a scientific meeting in Naples in the spring of 1951. This was the pattern that so excited Jim Watson, who, in The Double Helix, wrote: "Maurice's X-ray diffraction pattern of DNA was to the point. It was flicked on the screen near the end of his talk. Maurice's dry English form did not permit enthusiasm as he stated that the picture showed much more detail than previous pictures and could, in fact, be considered as arising from a crystalline substance. And when the structure of DNA was known, we might be in a better position to understand how genes work."