Rethinking the Discovery of DNA

After Crick's death, Coch and Craig and others were able to show was that in an individual there would be they would they could record from a single cell that would respond, say, to Sydney Opera House, or to a differential equation, or to a picture of Jennifer Aniston, but not a picture of Jennifer Aniston with Brad Pitt. And the inevitability of discussion. Discovery in science versus say creativity and art. Somebody surely would have discovered the double helix because that's the reality. Absolutely.

I mean I asked Jim Watson this about ten years ago. I asked him what was the most important thing that he'd ever done. And he immediately shot back, not the double helix, because that was inevitable. What people don't realize is they were not supposed to be working on DNA. That was not their topic.

They were both working in different ways on proteins at Cambridge. And it was only because One Crick, as his boss Lawrence Bragg put it, was the kind of chap who liked finishing other people's crosswords, so he was always interested in other people's problems. And he knew about the DNA issue through Maurice Wilkins at the Univers at uh King's College London. And they had a kind of bash at it in 1951, notoriously failed.

We already have this episode, so unlocking it is cheap and permanent: the full transcript (82 minutes, 15,680 words), segment and word-level timestamps, and .txt, .srt, .vtt and word-level JSON downloads, as many times as you like, forever.

No account needed, we create one from your checkout email. With credits it is 1 credit; packs start at 5 episodes for $3.49, and monthly plans are cheaper still.