About this Item
Discovery of the Double Helix and the Birth of Molecular Biology. First edition, rare, journal issues in the original printed wrappers, of the four papers by which the double-helix structure of deoxyribonucleic acid was announced to the world and its implications for heredity set out. The 25 April 1953 issue of Nature carries, under the common head-title 'Molecular Structure of Nucleic Acids,' three successive papers of a little over a page each: the Watson-Crick paper proposing the double helix with antiparallel sugar-phosphate backbones and complementary base-pairing; the Wilkins-Stokes-Wilson paper reporting the X-ray diffraction evidence that the B-form of DNA is helical; and the Franklin-Gosling paper giving the X-ray diffraction evidence that is in fact decisive for the helical structure, including the famous oxygen positions and fibre-diagram symmetry that Watson and Crick had used, in Franklin's absence and without her permission, to arrive at their model. Five weeks later, in the 30 May issue, the Watson-Crick paper 'Genetical Implications of the Structure of Deoxyribonucleic Acid' sets out what the two 1953 issues together amount to: that the sequence of bases along the double helix is the carrier of hereditary information; that the complementary structure of the molecule itself supplies the mechanism by which this information is copied from one generation to the next; and that mutation can be understood, for the first time, as a change at a single, localisable position in the molecule. For this body of work Watson, Crick, and Wilkins received the 1962 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine; Franklin, who had died of ovarian cancer in 1958 at the age of thirty-seven, was not named. The two issues together are listed in One Hundred Books Famous in Medicine as item 99, in Dibner's Heralds of Science as item 200, in Norman as 534, and in Garrison-Morton as 256.3, 256.4, 256.8, 752.1, and 752.7, reflecting the five distinct discoveries it is possible to cite them for. The problem the papers solved had been on the agenda of biology for eighty-four years. In 1869 the Swiss physiological chemist Friedrich Miescher, working in Felix Hoppe-Seyler's laboratory at Tübingen, had extracted from the nuclei of pus-coated surgical bandages a substance of unprecedentedly high phosphorus content, resistant to the proteolytic enzymes of the day, which he had named 'nuclein.' Miescher and his successors had correctly predicted that a whole family of such phosphorus-rich substances would be found to exist, equivalent in rank to the proteins, but the physiological role of the nucleins had remained unknown for the rest of the century. In 1944 Oswald Avery, Colin MacLeod, and Maclyn McCarty, at the Rockefeller Institute, had established through the pneumococcal transformation experiment that the hereditary material of the cell-the 'transforming principle'-was not, as most biochemists had expected, a protein but was Miescher's nuclein, now understood chemically as deoxyribonucleic acid. Through the following decade the basic chemistry of DNA was worked out: Alexander Todd at Cambridge had established the phosphate-sugar backbone; Erwin Chargaff at Columbia had discovered, from 1950 onward, that in DNA preparations from any source the molar ratio of adenine to thymine and of guanine to cytosine is always one to one, though the A+T to G+C ratio varies between species. These were the data. But what arrangement of atoms produced them, and how the arrangement could act as the carrier of hereditary information through the generations, remained entirely obscure. Two groups in England were applying X-ray crystallographic methods to DNA by the start of 1951. At the Medical Research Council Biophysics Unit at King's College London, under Sir John Randall, Maurice Wilkins had initiated a programme of X-ray diffraction work on DNA fibres; he was joined in late 1950 by Raymond Gosling, then a graduate student, and in January 1951 by Rosalind Franklin, a p.
Seller Inventory # 6690
Contact seller
Report this item
