Identifying the double helix

DNA model built by Crick and Watson in 1953, on display in theScience Museum, London.

In mid-March 1953, using experimental data collected by Rosalind Franklin and Maurice Wilkins, Watson and Crick deduced the double helixstructure of DNA. Sir Lawrence Bragg, the director of the Cavendish Laboratory (where Watson and Crick worked), made the original announcement of the discovery at a Solvay conference on proteins in Belgium on April 8, 1953; it went unreported by the press. Watson and Crick submitted a paper to the scientific journal Nature, which was published on April 25, 1953.This has been described by some other biologists and Nobel laureates as the most important scientific discovery of the 20th century.[citation needed] Bragg gave a talk at the Guy's Hospital Medical School in London on Thursday, May 14, 1953, which resulted in a May 15, 1953 article by Ritchie Calder in the London newspaper News Chronicle, entitled "Why You Are You. Nearer Secret of Life."

Sydney Brenner, Jack Dunitz, Dorothy Hodgkin, Leslie Orgel, and Beryl M. Oughton were some of the first people in April 1953 to see the model of the structure of DNA, constructed by Crick and Watson; at the time, they were working at Oxford University's Chemistry Department. All were impressed by the new DNA model, especially Brenner, who subsequently worked with Crick at Cambridge in the Cavendish Laboratory and the new Laboratory of Molecular Biology. According to the late Dr. Beryl Oughton, later Rimmer, they all travelled together in two cars once Dorothy Hodgkin announced to them that they were off to Cambridge to see the model of the structure of DNA.

The Cambridge University student newspaper Varsity also ran its own short article on the discovery on Saturday, May 30, 1953. Watson subsequently presented a paper on the double-helical structure of DNA at the 18th Cold Spring Harbor Symposium on Viruses in early June 1953, six weeks after the publication of the Watson and Crick paper in Nature. Many at the meeting had not yet heard of the discovery. The 1953 Cold Harbor Symposium was the first opportunity for many to see the model of the DNA double helix.