On the morning of February 28, 1953, the biologist James Watson and the physicist Francis Crick worked out the double-helix structure of deoxyribonucleic acid, a molecule better known as DNA.
It was purely a model without a scintilla of original research behind it—Watson and Crick purloined Rosalind Franklin’s X-ray crystallography data that spelled the structure out quite nicely, and got in just in time to cut the ceremonial ribbon on major advances in medicine, genetic engineering, and forensic science.
