George Gamow and the genetic code

Abstract

On February 28, 1953, in a pub in Cambridge, Francis Crick was telling everyone who cared to listen that he and James Watson had just discovered the secret of life. The April 25 issue of the journal Nature carried the same news in the form of their first, and most famous, paper, "A Structure for Deoxyribose Nucleic Acid". In it they announced that DNA, the molecular basis of heredity, was a right-handed double helix. It consisted of two intertwined, anti-parallel helical strands. Each strand was a long molecule made up of subunits which contained a sugar, deoxyribose, a phosphate group, and one of the four bases adenine (A), guanine (G), thymine (T) and cytosine (C). The two strands specified each other; they were 'complementary'. This was because they were held together by hydrogen bonds formed between adenine and thymine (A-T) and between guanine and cytosine (G-C). On May 30 there was a follow-up by Watson and Crick in the same journal, entitled "Genetical Implications of the Structure of Deoxyribonucleic Acid" It was seen by Luis Alvarez and brought by him to the attention of George Gamow, then visiting the University of California at Berkeley.