Cambridge (England): April 1953

Although my hair was properly long and my accent toned to suggest almost an English origin, Odile Crick told me I had still far to go before I would look right walking along Cambridge's King's Parade, much less looking purposefully indolent in one of its college gardens. My appearance would not have mattered if I were the same as a month ago-an unkempt slender figure who said what I thought as opposed to what good manners required. But now that Francis Crick and I had given the world the double helix, Cambridge in its own quiet way was bound to ask what we looked like. The time had come to acquire at least one set of clothes that would go well with Francis's Edwardian elegance. I was not trusted to act alone and Odile accompanied me to the men's clothing shop across from the chapel of John's (the College). My ill-fitting American tweed jacket was thrown out and replaced by a blue blazer and associated gray trousers. They would much better express my new status as the co-winner of a very great scientific jackpot.

The DNA molecule we had found two months before-in March 1953-was far more beautiful than we ever anticipated. With the two polynucleotide chains held together by adenine-thymine and guanine-cytosine base pairs, DNA had the complementary structure needed for the gene to be exactly copied during chromosome replication. When 1953 started, finding out what genes look like and how they replicate were two of the three big unsolved problems in genetics. Seemingly coming from nowhere, Francis and I had now grasped both. At times I virtually had to pinch myself to prove that I was not in the middle of a wonderful dream. But I was not, and so the possibility existed of a grand slam in which Francis and I also worked out how genes provide the information to make proteins.

By the flip of a coin, our names in the original manuscript had the order Watson-Crick instead of Crick-Watson. So several Cambridge wags now could refer to our DNA model as the WC structure. They suspected that our golden helix would be found tainted and destined for dumping down the water-closet drain.

I had become monomaniacal about DNA only in 1951 when I had just turned 23 and as a postdoctoral fellow was temporarily in Naples attending a small May meeting on biologically important macromolecules. There I learned from a mid-thirtyish English physicist called Maurice Wilkins that DNA, if properly prepared, diffracts X-rays as if it were a highly organized crystal. The odds were thus good that DNA molecules (genes) themselves have highly regular structures that conceivably could be worked out over the next several years. Briefly I considered asking Wilkins if he would let me join his London lab at King's College on the Strand, but my attempts to talk with him after his lecture elicited no enthusiastic response and I dropped the idea.

Instead, through the intervention of Salvador Luria, my Ph.D. supervisor at Indiana University, I was taken on five months later at the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge to work with an English chemist, John Kendrew. He was helping the Austrian-born chemist Max Perutz lead a small research group supported by the Medical Research Council (MRC) called the 'Unit for the Study of the Molecular Structure of Biological Systems.' Started in 1947, its scientists used X-ray methods to work on the three-dimensional structures of the oxygen-carrying proteins hemoglobin and myoglobin. In going to join the group, I hoped to expand the attention of the unit to DNA, so that they would let me work on it, instead of a protein, once I had learned X-ray diffraction...