Status Updates From The Double Helix: A Persona...

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After a year of peripherally thinking about DNA, Watson and Crick are put back on DNA after learning their rival Linus Pauling believed he had the structure. Realizing he had made an elementary mistake, and armed with new data about the base pairs and x-ray diffraction of B-DNA, Watson stumbled on the idea that the helix is two chained with identical sequences, leading to the thought that it plays a role in heredity.

James Watson meets Francis Crick, they both begin working on the structure of DNA via physical modeling and helical mathematics applied to the x-ray diffraction images of DNA. They invited the only other group working on DNA in the UK to see their progress and were quickly humbled by not understanding how many water molecules were shown to be in DNA. The embarrassment of the overstep caused their lab to ban DNA work.

James Watson is sent to Copenhagen after completing his PhD to study biochemistry with Herman Kalckar. However it was not interesting and Herman became distracted by his divorce. James is sent to Naples to a conference where he becomes interested in the structure of DNA. In order to work on this mystery he leaves to work in the Cavendish lab at Cambridge to learn x-ray diffraction.