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    Double Helix: How an Image Sparked the Discovery of the Secret of Life
    Double Helix: How an Image Sparked the Discovery of the Secret of Life
    Double Helix: How an Image Sparked the Discovery of the Secret of Life
    Ebook85 pages41 minutes

    Double Helix: How an Image Sparked the Discovery of the Secret of Life

    By Danielle Smith-Llera

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    About this ebook

    To the untrained eye, Photo 51 was simply a grainy black and white image of dark marks scattered in a rough cross shape. But to the eye of a trained scientist, it was a clear portrait of a DNA fiber taken with X-rays. And to young scientists James Watson and Francis Crick, it confirmed their guess of deoxyribonucleic acid's structure. In 1953 the pair was racing toward solving the mystery of DNA's structure before other scientists could beat them to it. They and others believed that finding the simple structure of the DNA molecule would answer a great mystery, how do organisms live, grow, develop, and survive, generation after generation? Photo 51 and subsequent models based on the photo would prove to be the key to unlocking the secret of life.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCapstone Young Readers
    Release dateAug 1, 2017
    ISBN9780756556877
    Double Helix: How an Image Sparked the Discovery of the Secret of Life
    Author

    Danielle Smith-Llera

    Danielle Smith-Llera grew up in coastal Virginia, hearing unforgettable tales about her Mexican and Irish ancestors. She first moved overseas to teach in international schools in Hungary and Brazil. Life in the U.S. Foreign Service has taken her around the world to live in India, Jamaica, Romania, Belgium, the United Kingdom, and Washington, DC. She loves sharing stories—fiction, nonfiction, and a mixture of both—in classrooms, museum exhibits, and, of course, books.

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      Book preview

      Double Helix - Danielle Smith-Llera

      Cover

      Chapter One

      GLIMPSE OF A PHOTO

      James Watson carried a document with him on the 50-mile (80-kilometer) train trip from Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge, England, to London. The paper had already traveled more than 5,000 miles (8,047 km) from California before arriving in his hands that late January day in 1953. He could not wait to share the news it held.

      After earning undergraduate and graduate degrees in the United States, James Watson worked with scientists in England.

      The American biologist hurried along the wide courtyard of King’s College in London where a German bomb had destroyed underground labs just over a decade earlier. World War II had demanded the skills of many scientists, including those of Maurice Wilkins, the friend he was heading to see in the King’s College physics labs.

      Wilkins had worked to improve radar, then traveled to Berkeley, California, to help develop the first nuclear weapons. But by the end of the war, he felt very disgusted with the dropping of two bombs on civilian centers in Japan¹ and returned to England and to King’s College to study something new.

      Inside the physics labs, Wilkins peered into cells, deep inside the nucleus, to a molecule called deoxyribonucleic acid — DNA for short. No one fully understood the shape or construction of the molecule. Many other scientists were more interested in studying the cell’s proteins. After all, they are complex and direct nearly every task in the human body. Yet some scientists, including Wilkins, hoped that finding the simple structure of the DNA molecule would help answer a great mystery of life: How do organisms live, grow, develop, and survive, generation after generation?

      Watson thought the answer might lie in DNA. Questions about the mysterious molecule had brought him across the Atlantic Ocean to labs in Europe three years earlier. It was well known that DNA was composed of a few basic parts: phosphate and sugar molecules that were linked to form chains. Scientists also knew that DNA contained four types of nitrogen-based molecules, called bases: adenine, cytosine, guanine, and thymine. But how did these simple building blocks all fit together?

      King George IV and the Duke of Wellington founded King’s College London in 1829. It is part of the University of London.

      Watson burst into King’s physics labs, eager to share a new scientific paper written by Linus Pauling of the California Institute of Technology. It described how these simple parts could build a DNA molecule. Twenty-four-year old Watson admired Pauling, the 51-year-old chemist who had discovered that protein molecules could take the shape of a coil, called an alpha helix. In a 1950 lecture, Pauling had presented his model of the single staircase-like structure and received worldwide praise. There was no one like Linus in all the world, Watson once wrote. The combination of his prodigious mind and infectious grin was unbeatable.²

      Linus Pauling would win two Nobel prizes — one in chemistry and one for his work for peace.

      But the famed chemist had blundered with DNA, and Watson knew it. Pauling’s mistake was contained in a diagram in the paper Watson clutched. Pauling imagined a triple helix of phosphate and sugar chains twisting around each other with the nitrogen bases attached and pointing outward, like leaves on a tree branch. Watson knew this theory was

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