They were hardly modest, these two brash young scientists who in 1953 declared to patrons of the Eagle Pub in Cambridge, England, that they had "found the secret of life." But James Watson and Francis ...

In 1957, just four years after Francis Crick and other scientists solved the riddle of DNA’s structure—the now famous double helix—Crick laid out what he called the “central dogma” of molecular ...

For James Watson, DNA was everything — not just his life's work, but the secret of life itself. Over his long and storied career, Watson arguably did more than any other scientist to transform a ...

"DNA was no mere discovery," says Howard Markel, a historian who wrote a book on how Watson, Crick, Franklin and others uncovered this molecule's structure. "It's a light switch moment." In his ...