However, no one had figured the structure of the DNA until Watson and Crick presented their model of DNA in 1953.
Dr. Bernstein and Dr. Lander believe that the answer lies in the structure of the DNA itself.
A second source of innovation was the discovery in 1953 by Watson and Crick of the structure of the DNA molecule.
Others, like Francis Crick, who with James Watson discovered the structure of the DNA molecule, have flirted with the idea.
It began quietly, with an understated speculation -- on a single page of the April 25 , 1953 issue of the scientific journal Nature -- about the structure of the DNA molecule.
Then the Nobel Prize-winning molecular biologist James Watson — with Francis Crick, a co-discoverer of the structure of the DNA molecule — took the stage to pay tribute to Mr. Wilson in what seemed more like a roast.
It is clear that, had Franklin lived, the Nobel prize committee ought to have awarded her a Nobel prize, too – her conceptual understanding of the structure of the DNA molecule and its significance was on a par with that of Watson and Crick, while her crystallographic data were as good as, if not better, than those of Wilkins.
It was only four years after the discovery of the structure of the DNA molecule by James Watson and Francis Crick, and one year after scientists had established that the correct number of human chromosomes was 46, a finding that helped genetics begin to flourish.
1953 Dr. James D. Watson and Dr. Francis Crick, aided by the work of Rosalind Franklin and Dr. Maurice Wilkins, discern the structure of the DNA molecule: two strands of nucleotides (sugars, phosphate groups and bases) spiraling around each other in a double helix.
Modern biology was launched in large part by three discoveries: Oswald Avery's discovery of DNA; Watson and Crick's deciphering of the physical structure of the DNA; and the discovery, by several researchers in the early nineteen sixties, of the code by which different triples of RNA nucleotides are turned into amino acids.
