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Walter Gilbert is in the Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology,
Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138, USA.
The complete electronic version of this article can be found online
at
http://www.nature.com/cgi-taf/DynaPage.taf?file=/nature/journal/v421/n6921/full/421315a_fs.html
How Jim Watson saw the structure of DNA transform biology.
Watson and DNA: Making a Scientific Revolution
by Victor K. McElheny
Perseus/John Wiley: 2003. 400 pp. $27.50/£18.99
The past half-century has truly been the era of DNA, with the publication
by Watson and Crick of a model for its structure in 1953, the identification
of the genetic code in the 1960s, recombinant DNA and DNA sequencing
in the 1970s, biotechnology and the polymerase chain reaction in
the 1980s, and the Human Genome Project in the 1990s. The vision
that molecules could explain life, and that the most important molecule
was that which carries the genetic information from parent to daughter
cell, has transformed not just biology but also the world around
us. Every organism on Earth is assembled by a set of instructions
carried as a linear string of information in a set of DNA molecules,
which have an unbroken line of ancestor molecules going back to
the first cells that arose upon the Earth.
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