Brief
February
20, 2003
What achievement laid the groundwork for much of scientists' understanding of inheritance, evolution and disease, made possible the sequencing of the human genome, spawned the industry of biotechnology - and even provided the inspiration for Fred Hutchinson's logo?
The DNA double helix, of course, and Friday, Feb. 28, marks the 50th anniversary of its discovery.
To commemorate the anniversary, the center will host a cake-and-punch celebration from 1:30 to 3 p.m. Friday, Feb. 28, in (where else?) the Double Helix Café, as well as the Club Met Café at Met East.
The discovery of the double helix stems from studies, including those conducted by Drs. Rosalind Franklin and Maurice Wilkins, on the three-dimensional structure of DNA, which revealed a configuration resembling a twisted ladder-like molecule.
The scientists identified Feb. 28 as their "a-ha" date, and on April 25, 1953, Drs. James Watson and Francis Crick published the findings in the journal Nature.
Watson, Crick and Wilkins received the 1962 Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine "for their discoveries concerning the molecular structure of nucleic acids and its significance for information transfer in living material." (Franklin died of ovarian cancer in 1958.)
The double helical structure endows DNA with the ability to store the blueprints required to construct a living organism.
Each rung of the ladder consists of a pair of building blocks, known as bases, which are the "letters" of the four-letter alphabet (G, T, C and A) that makes up the genetic code.
Genes consist of a unique string of letters that spell out the recipe for making a protein. To pass this information from one generation to the next, the ladder unzips between the bases to allow each strand of the helix to be faithfully copied prior to cell division.
For more information, visit: http://www.dna50.org/main.htm .
