The Book The Double Helix: A Personal Account Of The Discovery Of DNA

The Double Helix: A Personal Account of the Discovery of DNA was ultimately an informative book on how the structure of DNA was discovered. Watson gave a different perspective to the discovery of the structure of DNA by explaining it from his point of view. This book is intricately detailed in the discovery of DNA, and gives important information about the personal lives of those involved.

One of the first attributes of NOS that was demonstrated in this book was how Watson and Crick went about the discovery of DNA. The two scientists never did a true experiment, rather, they used other scientists' research. In order to do this, they gathered all of the other scientists' research and began piecing it together slowly. The question that all

Despite the fact that the two scientists did not do a true experiment, there was still a vast amount of research and observations going into the discovery. The discovery of DNA was a process. This is made clear in the book when Watson states, “Virtually all the evidence then available made me believe that DNA was the template upon which RNA chains were made” (Watson, 1968, p. 153). Watson did a lot of research in order to see what the processes of the cell were. From that point, he came up with his own conclusions, “...I taped up a paper sheet saying DNA → RNA → Proteins” (Watson, 1968, p. 153). Another example of the process is when Watson discovered that DNA was a double helix, however, he was still trying to understand how the base pairs paired together. He first came up with the adenine, guanine, thymine, and cytosine paired with themselves. However, through further explaining, he realized that would not be possible (p. 184-187). Science is also a product. That is made clear by the fact that Watson and Crick simply used a collection of other research to come up with the structure of

I really enjoyed learning that both Watson and Crick were not originally supposed to be studying DNA. Crick was originally studying x-ray diffraction (Watson, 1968, p. 8) and Watson was originally studying biochemistry (Watson, 1968, p. 21). The two scientists began their journey on learning more about DNA after Watson heard a lecture from Maurice (Watson, 1968, p. 33). Watson stated, “Immediately I began to wonder whether it would be possible for me to join Wilkins in working on DNA” (Watson, 1968, p. 22). I think this fact is incredibly fascinating. When I typically think about people discovering, I think of it being their life passion. For Watson and Crick, however, this passion did not come until they were already set to work on other projects. The mass media and textbooks tend to state the results of an experiment instead of giving the details on how the discoveries were actually made. I enjoyed learning about the intricacies of the scientific