Race for the Double Helix Summary

In the movie Race for the Double Helix, a young man named James Watson had to dream of winning wealth and earning fame by discovering the mystery of what DNA looked like. Watson said there was money in genes and that “DNA holds the genetic secret”. Starting in Naples, Italy, and then going to Paris, France, Watson became partners with a man named Francis Crick. These two hit it off when they realized they both thought that genetics was in the nucleic acid. Watson and Crick were hard at study trying to figure out the structure that DNA, properly called deoxyribonucleic acid, had. Two other scientists named Rosalind Franklin and Maurice Wilkins were also studying the structure of DNA adding competition to who could figure it out first. Both pairs of scientists knew that DNA had a helix shape, but they didn’t know how many or how the purines and pyrimidines fit together. Watson and Crick went to many different ends of the Earth in order to be number one. Something, not genetics related but I thought was interesting to take notes of, was in the movie women in science were not largely represented back in the 1950s. But it was technically Franklin who made the very big discovery. It also dated the movie when the giant bag of candy was placed on the desk saying that the sugar rationing was over. Watson and Crick first made a fool out of themselves when they took the idea from other scientists that there were eight molecules of water per unit cell, which they heard incorrectly. When presenting to a bunch of other scientists, they found out it was eight molecules of water per nucleotide making their research very far from the theory. The boss of the two men at one point said they needed to put this race to rest. He ordered Crick to go back to studying hemoglobin and released Watson, but the men didn’t give up. From what I got from the movie, it was Rosalind Franklin who truly discovered the structure of the double helix, but Watson and Crick looked at her research and were able to put the dots together quicker than Rosalind did. The men figured out how to have the bonds all fit together and to have the hydrogens in the keto form thanks to a scientist by the name of Jerry Donahue. He told Watson and Crick to switch the hydrogens from the enol form they have it in to the keto form, that way the bonds could all fit. They found that of the four base pairs adenine pairs with thymine and cytosine pairs with guanine. Near the end of the movie Watson and Crick had a “eureka” moment figuring out that it was a double helix with DNA strands that ran antiparallel to each other allowing the purines and pyrimidines to fit complementary to each other along with the hydrogen to be in the keto form. The men demonstrated this in their office with two wooden pencils showing the directions of the three prime and five prime ends. In class we learned about the antiparallel strands that are in DNA. DNA has two strands in the double helix that are held together by complementary bonds that are attracted to each other since each strand of DNA runs in the opposite direction. Antiparallel in simple terms means one strand runs from the 5-prime end to the 3 prime end and its complementary strand runs from the 3-prime end to the 5-prime end, which allows the DNA strand to keep going forming a double helix. Watson and Crick, along with Maurice Wilkins, published their findings and were awarded the Noble Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1962 for their discovery of the DNA double helix which transfers information in all things living.