Dna: The Secret of Life

by Watson, James

  Crick was unable to make the seminar, so I attended alone and briefed him later on what I believed to be its key take-home messages on crystalline DNA. In particular, I described from memory Franklin's measurements of the crystallographic repeats and the water content. This prompted Crick to begin sketching helical grids on a sheet of paper, explaining that the new helical X-ray theory he had devised with Bill Cochran and Vladimir Vand would permit even me, a former bird-watcher, to predict correctly the diffraction patterns expected from the molecular models we would soon be building at the Cavendish.

  As soon as we got back to Cambridge, I arranged for the Cavendish machine shop to construct the phosphorous atom models needed for short sections of the sugar phosphate backbone found in DNA. Once these became available, we tested different ways the backbones might twist around each other in the center of the DNA molecule. Their regular repeating atomic structure should allow the atoms to come together in a consistent, repeated conformation. Following Wilkins's hunch, we focused on three-chain models. When one of these appeared to be almost plausible, Crick made a phone call to Wilkins to announce we had a model we thought might be DNA.

  The next day both Wilkins and Franklin came up to see what we had done. The threat of unanticipated competition briefly united them in common purpose. Franklin wasted no time in faulting our basic concept. My memory was that she had reported almost no water present in crystalline DNA. In fact, the opposite was true. Being a crystallographic novice, I had confused the terms "unit cell" and "asymmetric unit." Crystalline DNA was in fact water-rich. Consequently, Franklin pointed out, the backbone had to be on the outside and not, as we had it, in the center, if only to accommodate all the water molecules she had observed in her crystals.

  That unfortunate November day cast a very long shadow. Franklin's opposition to model-building was reinforced. Doing experiments, not playing with Tinkertoy representations of atoms, was the way she intended to proceed. Even worse, Sir Lawrence Bragg passed down the word that Crick and I should desist from all further attempts at building a DNA model. It was further decreed that DNA research should be left to the King's lab, with Cambridge continuing to focus solely on proteins. There was no sense in two MRC-funded labs competing against each other. With no more bright ideas up our sleeves, Crick and I were reluctantly forced to back off, at least for the time being.

  It was not a good moment to be condemned to the DNA sidelines. Linus Pauling had written Wilkins to request a copy of the crystalline DNA diffraction pattern. Though Wilkins had declined, saying he wanted more time to interpret it himself, Pauling was hardly obliged to depend upon data from King's. If he wished, he could easily start serious X-ray diffraction studies at Caltech.

  The following spring, I duly turned away from DNA and set about extending prewar studies on the pencil-shaped tobacco mosaic virus using the Cavendish's powerful new X-ray beam. This light experimental workload gave me plenty of time to wander through various Cambridge libraries. In the zoology building, I read Erwin Chargaff's paper describing his finding that the DNA bases adenine and thymine occurred in roughly equal amounts, as did the bases guanine and cytosine. Hearing of these one-to-one ratios Crick wondered whether, during DNA duplication, adenine residues might be attracted to thymine and vice versa, and whether a corresponding attraction might exist between guanine and cytosine. If so, base sequences on the "parental" chains (e.g., ATGC) would have to be complementary to those on "daughter" strands (yielding in this case TACG).

  These remained idle thoughts until Erwin Chargaff came through Cambridge in the summer of 1952 on his way to the International Biochemical Congress in Paris. Chargaff expressed annoyance that neither Crick nor I saw the need to know the chemical structures of the four bases. He was even more upset when we told him that we could simply look up the structures in textbooks as the need arose. I was left hoping that Chargaff's data would prove irrelevant. Crick, however, was energized to do several experiments looking for molecular "sandwiches" that might form when adenine and thymine (or alternatively, guanine and cytosine) were mixed together in solution. But his experiments went nowhere.

  Like Chargaff, Linus Pauling also attended the International Biochemical Congress, where the big news was the latest result from the Phage Group. Alfred Hershey and Martha Chase at Cold Spring Harbor had just confirmed Avery's transforming principle: DNA was the hereditary material! Hershey and Chase proved that only the DNA of the phage virus enters bacterial cells; its protein coat remains on the outside. It was more obvious than ever that DNA must be understood at the molecular level if we were to uncover the essence of the gene. With Hershey and Chase's result the talk of the town, I was sure that Pauling would now bring his formidable intellect and chemical wisdom to bear on the problem of DNA.

  Early in 1953, Pauling did indeed publish a paper outlining the structure of DNA. Reading it anxiously I saw that he was proposing a three-chain model with sugar phosphate backbones forming a dense central core. Superficially it was similar to our botched model of fifteen months earlier. But instead of using positively charged atoms (e.g., Mg2+) to stabilize the negatively charged backbones, Pauling made the unorthodox suggestion that the phosphates were held together by hydrogen bonds. But it seemed to me, the biologist, that such hydrogen bonds required extremely acidic conditions never found in cells. With a mad dash to Alexander Todd's nearby organic chemistry lab my belief was confirmed: The impossible had happened. The world's best-known, if not best, chemist had gotten his chemistry wrong. In effect, Pauling had knocked the A off of DNA. Our quarry was deoxyribonucleic acid, but the structure he was proposing was not even acidic.

  Hurriedly I took the manuscript to London to inform Wilkins and Franklin they were still in the game. Convinced that DNA was not a helix, Franklin had no wish even to read the article and deal with the distraction of Pauling's helical ideas, even when I offered Crick's arguments for helices. Wilkins, however, was very interested indeed in the news I brought; he was now more certain than ever that DNA was helical. To prove the point, he showed me a photograph obtained more than six months earlier by Franklin's graduate student Raymond Gosling, who had X-rayed the so-called B form of DNA. Until that moment, I didn't know a B form even existed. Franklin had put this picture aside, preferring to concentrate on the A form, which she thought would more likely yield useful data. The X-ray pattern of this B form was a distinct cross (see Plate 13). Since Crick and others had already deduced that such a pattern of reflections would be created by a helix, this evidence made it clear that DNA had to be a helix! In fact, despite Franklin's reservations, this was no surprise. Geometry itself suggested that a helix was the most logical arrangement for a long string of repeating units such as the nucleotides of DNA. But we still did not know what that helix looked like, nor how many chains it contained.

  The time had come to resume building helical models of DNA. Pauling was bound to realize soon enough that his brainchild was wrong. I urged Wilkins to waste no time. But he wanted to wait until Franklin had completed her scheduled departure for another lab later that spring. She had decided to move on to avoid the unpleasantness at King's. Before leaving, she had been ordered to stop further work with DNA and had already passed on many of her diffraction images to Wilkins.

  When I returned to Cambridge and broke the news of the DNA B form, Bragg no longer saw any reason for Crick and me to avoid DNA. He very much wanted the DNA structure to be found on his side of the Atlantic. So we went back to model-building, looking for a way the known basic components of DNA – the backbone of the molecule and the four different bases, adenine, thymine, guanine, and cytosine – could fit together to make a helix. I commissioned the shop at the Cavendish to make us a set of tin bases, but they couldn't produce them fast enough for me: I ended up cutting out rough approximations from stiff cardboard.

  By this time I realized the DNA density-measurement evidence actually slightly favored a two-chain, rather than three-chain, model. So I decided to search out plausible doubl
e helices. As a biologist, I preferred the idea of a genetic molecule made of two, rather than three, components. After all, chromosomes, like cells, increase in number by duplicating, not triplicating.

  I knew that our previous model with the backbone on the inside and the bases hanging out was wrong. Chemical evidence from the University of Nottingham, which I had too long ignored, indicated that the bases must be hydrogen-bonded to each other. They could only form bonds like this in the regular manner implied by the X-ray diffraction data if they were in the center of the molecule (see Plate 14). But how could they come together in pairs? For two weeks I got nowhere, misled by an error in my nucleic acid chemistry textbook. Happily, on February 27, Jerry Donahue, a theoretical chemist visiting the Cavendish from Caltech, pointed out that the textbook was wrong. So I changed the locations of the hydrogen atoms on my cardboard cutouts of the molecules.

  The next morning, February 28, 1953, the key features of the DNA model all fell into place. The two chains were held together by strong hydrogen bonds between adenine-thymine and guanine-cytosine base pairs (see Plate 15). The inferences Crick had drawn the year before based on Chargaff's research had indeed been correct. Adenine does bond to thymine and guanine does bond to cytosine, but not through flat surfaces to form molecular sandwiches. When Crick arrived, he took it all in rapidly, and gave my base-pairing scheme his blessing. He realized right away that it would result in the two strands of the double helix running in opposite directions.

  It was quite a moment. We felt sure that this was it. Anything that simple, that elegant just had to be right. What got us most excited was the complementarity of the base sequences along the two chains. If you knew the sequence – the order of bases – along one chain, you automatically knew the sequence along the other. It was immediately apparent that this must be how the genetic messages of genes are copied so exactly when chromosomes duplicate prior to cell division. The molecule would "unzip" to form two separate strands. Each separate strand then could serve as the template for the synthesis of a new strand, one double helix becoming two.

  In What Is Life? Schrödinger had suggested that the language of life might be like Morse code, a series of dots and dashes. He wasn't far off. The language of DNA is a linear series of As, Ts, Gs, and Cs. And just as transcribing a page out of a book can result in the odd typo, the rare mistake creeps in when all these As, Ts, Gs, and Cs are being copied along a chromosome. These errors are the mutations geneticists had talked about for almost fifty years. Change an "i" to an "a" and "Jim" becomes "Jam" in English; change a T to a C and "ATG" becomes "ACG" in DNA.

  The double helix made sense chemically and it made sense biologically. Now there was no need to be concerned about Schrödinger's suggestion that new laws of physics might be necessary for an understanding of how the hereditary code-script is duplicated: genes in fact were no different from the rest of chemistry. Later that day, during lunch at the Eagle, the pub virtually adjacent to the Cavendish Lab, Crick, ever the talker, could not help but tell everyone we had just found the "secret of life." I myself, though no less electrified by the thought, would have waited until we had a pretty three-dimensional model to show off (see Plate 16).

  Among the first to see our demonstration model was the chemist Alexander Todd. That the nature of the gene was so simple both surprised and pleased him. Later, however, he must have asked himself why his own lab, having established the general chemical structure of DNA chains, had not moved on to asking how the chains folded up in three dimensions. Instead the essence of the molecule was left to be discovered by a two-man team, a biologist and a physicist, neither of whom possessed a detailed command even of undergraduate chemistry. But paradoxically, this was, at least in part, the key to our success: Crick and I arrived at the double helix first precisely because most chemists at that time thought DNA too big a molecule to understand by chemical analysis.

  At the same time, the only two chemists with the vision to seek DNA's 3-D structure made major tactical mistakes: Rosalind Franklin's was her resistance to model-building; Linus Pauling's was a matter of simply neglecting to read the existing literature on DNA, particularly the data on its base composition published by Chargaff. Ironically, Pauling and Chargaff sailed across the Atlantic on the same ship following the Paris Biochemical Congress in 1952, but failed to hit it off. Pauling was long accustomed to being right. And he believed there was no chemical problem he could not work out from first principles by himself. Usually this confidence was not misplaced. During the Cold War, as a prominent critic of the American nuclear weapons development program, he was questioned by the FBI after giving a talk. How did he know how much plutonium there is in an atomic bomb? Pauling's response was "Nobody told me. I figured it out.

  Over the next several months Crick and (to a lesser extent) I relished showing off our model to an endless stream of curious scientists. However, the Cambridge biochemists did not invite us to give a formal talk in the biochemistry building. They started to refer to it as the "WC," punning our initials with those used in Britain for the toilet or water closet. That we had found the double helix without doing experiments irked them.

  The manuscript that we submitted to Nature in early April was published just over three weeks later, on April 25, 1953 (see Plate 17). Accompanying it were two longer papers by Franklin and Wilkins, both supporting the general correctness of our model. In June, I gave the first presentation of our model at the Cold Spring Harbor symposium on viruses. Max Delbriick saw to it that I was offered, at the last minute, an invitation to speak. To this intellectually high-powered meeting I brought a three-dimensional model built in the Cavendish, the adenine-thymine base pairs in red and the guanine-cytosine base pairs in green.

  In the audience was Seymour Benzer, yet another ex-physicist who had heeded the clarion call of Schrödinger's book. He immediately understood what our breakthrough meant for his studies of mutations in viruses. He realized that he could now do for a short stretch of bacteriophage DNA what Morgan's boys had done forty years earlier for fruit fly chromosomes: he would map mutations – determine their order – along a gene, just as the fruit fly pioneers had mapped genes along a chromosome. Like Morgan, Benzer would have to depend on recombination to generate new genetic combinations, but, whereas Morgan had the advantage of a ready mechanism of recombination – the production of sex cells in a fruit fly – Benzer had to induce recombination by simultaneously infecting a single bacterial host cell with two different strains of bacteriophage, which differed by one or more mutations in the region of interest. Within the bacterial cell, recombination – the exchange of segments of molecules – would occasionally occur between the different viral DNA molecules, producing new permutations of mutations – so-called "recombinants." Within a single astonishingly productive year in his Purdue University lab, Benzer produced a map of a single bacteriophage gene, rII, showing how a series of mutations – all errors in the genetic script – were laid out linearly along the virus DNA. The language was simple and linear, just like a line of text on the written page.

  The response of the Hungarian physicist Leo Szilard to my Cold Spring Harbor talk on the double helix was less academic. His question was, "Can you patent it?" At one time Szilard's main source of income had been a patent that he held with Einstein, and he had later tried unsuccessfully to patent with Enrico Fermi the nuclear reactor they built at the University of Chicago in 1942. But then as now patents were given only for useful inventions and at the time no one could conceive of a practical use for DNA. Perhaps then, Szilard suggested, we should copyright it.

  There remained, however, a single missing piece in the double helical jigsaw puzzle: our unzipping idea for DNA replication had yet to be experimentally verified. Max Delbrück, for example, was unconvinced. Though he liked the double helix as a model, he worried that unzipping it might generate horrible knots. Five years later, a former student of Pauling's, Matt Meselson, and the equally bright young phage worker Frank Stahl put to rest su
ch fears when they published the results of a single elegant experiment.

  They had met in the summer of 1954 at the Marine Biological Laboratory at Woods Hole, Massachusetts, where I was then lecturing, and agreed – over a good many gin martinis – that they should get together to do some science. The result of their collaboration has been described as "the most beautiful experiment in biology" (see Plate 18).

  They used a centrifugation technique that allowed them to sort molecules according to slight differences in weight; following a centrifugal spin, heavier molecules end up nearer the bottom of the test tube than lighter ones (see Plate 19). Because nitrogen atoms (N) are a component of DNA, and because they exist in two distinct forms, one light and one heavy, Meselson and Stahl were able to tag segments of DNA and thereby track the process of its replication in bacteria. Initially all the bacteria were raised in a medium containing heavy N, which was thus incorporated in both strands of the DNA. From this culture they took a sample, transferring it to a medium containing only light N, ensuring that the next round of DNA replication would have to make use of light N. If, as Crick and I had predicted, DNA replication involves unzipping the double helix and copying each strand, the resultant two "daughter" DNA molecules in the experiment would be hybrids, each consisting of one heavy N strand (the template strand derived from the "parent" molecule) and one light N strand (the one newly fabricated from the new medium). Meselson and Stahl's centrifugation procedure bore out these expectations precisely. They found three discrete bands in their centrifuge tubes, with the heavy-then-light sample halfway between the heavy-heavy and light-light samples. DNA replication works just as our model supposed it would.