CORBIS James Watson and Francis Crick, crackers of the DNA code, in 1959

Monday, March 29, 1999
On Feb. 28, 1953, Francis Crick walked into the Eagle pub in Cambridge, England, and, as James Watson later recalled, announced that "we had found the secret of life." Actually, they had. That morning, Watson and Crick had figured out the structure of deoxyribonucleic acid, DNA. And that structure — a "double helix" that can "unzip" to make copies of itself — confirmed suspicions that DNA carries life's hereditary information.

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Not until decades later, in the age of genetic engineering, would the Promethean power unleashed that day become vivid. But from the beginning, the Watson and Crick story had traces of hubris. As told in Watson's classic memoir, "The Double Helix," it was a tale of boundless ambition, impatience with authority and disdain, if not contempt, for received opinion. ("A goodly number of scientists," Watson explained, "are not only narrow-minded and dull but also just stupid.") Yet the Watson and Crick story is also one of sublime harmony, an example, as a colleague put it, of "that marvelous resonance between two minds — that high state in which 1 plus 1 does not equal 2 but more like 10."

The men were in some ways an odd pair. The British Crick, at 35, still had no Ph.D. The American Watson, 12 years Crick's junior, had graduated from the University of Chicago at 19 and nabbed his doctorate at 22. But they shared a certain wanderlust, an indifference to boundaries. Crick had migrated from physics into chemistry and biology, fascinated by the line "between the living and the nonliving." Watson had studied ornithology, then forsook birds for viruses, and then, doing postdoctoral work in Europe, took another sharp career turn.

At a conference in Naples, Watson saw a vague, ghostly image of a DNA molecule rendered by X-ray crystallography. DNA, he had heard, might be the stuff genes are made of. "A potential key to the secret of life was impossible to push out of my mind," he later wrote. "It was certainly better to imagine myself becoming famous than maturing into a stifled academic who had never risked a thought."

This theme of Watson's book — the hot pursuit of glory, the race against the chemist Linus Pauling for the Nobel Prize that DNA would surely bring--got bad reviews from the (relatively) genteel Crick. He didn't recall anyone mentioning a Nobel Prize. "My impression was that we were just, you know, mad keen to solve the problem," he later said. But whatever their aims, Watson and Crick shared an attraction to DNA, and when they wound up in the same University of Cambridge lab, they bonded.

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