When I went to Oxford in October 1952 to work on bacteriophage with Hinshelwood, it was the intention of seeing whether physical chemistry could provide help in solving biological problems. I should have gone to study molecular biology but the subject did not yet exist. From my past experience in cytology and cytogenetics, I knew that DNA was the material basis of heredity and that RNA was important for protein synthesis. I had read Schrödinger's book (What is Life? Cambridge; 1944) but, more importantly, I had read von Neumann's article (in Cerebral Mechanisms in Behaviour: the Hixon symposium. Edited by Jeffress L A: Hafner Publishing Company, New York; 1951) on the theory of self-reproducing machines. Beyond this, I had many nebulous ideas on how nucleic acids might exert their function and on how we might test them, including one ridiculous proposal that the structure of nucleic acids could be solved by dichroism measurements of DNA complexed with acridine dyes. I met Jack Dunitz and Leslie Orgel in Oxford and we had many interesting discussion on these topics. It was Jack who told me that the structure of DNA had probably been solved by two people in Cambridge, Francis Crick and Jim Watson, and I can remember trying to understand Jack's explanation of Francis' work on helical diffraction. On a chilly morning in April 1953, with Jack, Leslie and another crystallographer, I went to Cambridge and saw the model and met Francis and Jim. It was the most exciting day of my life. The double helix was a revelatory experience; for me, everything fell into place and my future scientific life was decided there and then. When the paper appeared a few weeks later, it was not well received by the establishment, composed largely of professional biochemists. They could not see, at the time, how profoundly it would change their subject by offering us a framework for studying the chemistry of biological information.
Sydney Brenner. "A Structure for Deoxyribose Nucleic Acid" by J. D. Watson and F. H. C. Crick. Nature 1953, 171:737-738. Appears in "Outstanding Papers in Biology," selected and introduced by Sydney Brenner. 1953.

"And then Sydney [Brenner] came over. On about the first occasion I saw Sydney, we talked about six hours non-stop. Sydney had a few bright friends in Oxford who talked about DNA, but they didn't have expert pictures and didn't do anything about it."
James Watson. James Watson quoted inNature, 302, 21 (April 1983): 654. April 1983.

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