GENETICS × TECHNOLOGY

The Structure of DNA

1953 CE

Phanerozoic · Cenozoic · Quaternary · Holocene · Meghalayan

Three papers published side by side in April 1953 established the double helix: the model of Watson and Crick, the X-ray data of Wilkins and colleagues, and the diffraction photographs of Franklin and Gosling. The structure explained itself. Each base pairs with only one other, so the two strands carry the same message twice, and separating them leaves two templates where there was one.

Why it matters

Four billion years of inheritance suddenly had a mechanism, and it was visible in the shape. Everything downstream on this timeline, reading a genome, copying DNA at will, editing it, follows from a molecule built so that a copy is what you get when you pull it apart.

Sources

1. Watson & Crick (1953), Nature · Molecular structure of nucleic acids: a structure for deoxyribose nucleic acid
2. Franklin & Gosling (1953), Nature · Molecular configuration in sodium thymonucleate
3. Wilkins et al. (1953), Nature · Molecular structure of deoxypentose nucleic acids

Earth history as one day

23:59:59.99861.4 ms before midnight

if Earth’s 4.54 billion years were compressed into a single day