It's 60 Years Since the Discovery of the Structure of DNA

London, United Kingdom, February 27, 2013 --(PR.com)-- Sixty years ago, Francis Crick, James Watson, Maurice Wilkins and Rosalind Franklin solved a mystery that had been puzzling scientists for decades when they determined the structure of the double helix in DNA which has led to countless scientific advances ever since. While the findings were officially published for the first time on 25 April 1953 in Nature, the news was unofficially broken in a Cambridge pub, The Eagle, on 28 February 1953. For this discovery, Crick, Watson and Wilkins were awarded the 1962 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.

Web of Stories truly brings the scale of this discovery to life with a host of insightful recordings from Watson and Crick as well as other scientists and biologists who share their views and tell their stories in their own words.

In a series of fascinating clips, Watson recounts the realization that he and Crick had determined the structure of DNA: "About 24 hours after being told that I was wasting my time, I changed the location of the hydrogen atoms on the paper, cardboard base pairs that I’d made, and did that on the last day of February of 1953, a Saturday morning. And had put together the right base pairs by 10 or 10.30 when Francis saw them, and they were the same size. And then he immediately realized if you flip flop them over they could, any base could be on either chain, and you could… the chains going, and the structure meant the chains went in opposite directions, which the space group had predicted… So that all probably occurred within 10 minutes. That was it… That was the moment."

Crick reminisces about how it took a long time for their work to gain credit: "It went in… various stages of being a good idea to being pretty plausible to being fairly probable to being very probable to being almost certainly right, but… that final stage took 25 years."

Crick goes on to share stories of how he and Watson worked together, how their work on DNA has shaped science for the future and his thoughts on the controversy around Rosalind Franklin and the Nobel Prize.

Other key scientists can be viewed discussing this discovery and its implications.

All of these fascinating recordings can be watched as a number of short clips ranging in length between one and several minutes, with a fully searchable transcript. All Web of Stories videos are easy to share with friends and colleagues, and may be embedded into personal blogs and websites.