Watson, Crick, and DNA

When Francis Crick announced in 1953 that he and colleague James Watson had "found the secret of life," he wasn't joking. Earlier that morning, the two scientists had decrypted the structure of life's hereditary information: deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA).

 

DNA 는 모든 살아있는 세포의 핵에 존재하며 생물학적인 특성을 결정하는 새로운 단백질을 만드는데 세포를 인도한다. Watson과 Crick 이전에 과학자들은 DNA가 모든 살아있는 유기체의 특성을 결정하는 정보를 운반해준다는 것을 알고 있었고, 그들은 DNA 가 한세대에서 다음 세대로 복사된다는 것을 추정했지만, 아무도 이러한 정보를 어떻게 부호화해야 될지, 어떻게 전달되는지 알지 못했다.

 

Crick (1916 - 2004 ), an English researcher, and Watson (1928 - ), an American postdoctoral scholar, shared a lab at Cambridge University in the 1950s. Together, they discovered that a strand of DNA looked like a twisted ladder, which they called a double helix. They also realized that each strand was made up of four building blocks, called bases. These building blocks were named adenine, thymine, guanine, and cytosine (also known as A, T, G, and C ) and were bound together with hydrogen atoms to create different patterns. Working with cardboard replicas of the four bases, Crick and Watson realized that adenine and thymine always bound together, as did guanine and cytosine. These bonds form what look like rungs on DNA's twisted ladder. When a cell reproduces, this ladder "unzips," and new bases are added to each side of the helix―resulting in two new cells with identical DNA.

 

1955 년에 중남미 생화학자인 Severo Ochoa (1905 - 1993 )는 뉴욕의학 대학의 연구실에서 처음으로 핵산을 발명한 사람이다. 그는 리보핵산(RNA)을 가지고 일을 했는데, 얼마 안되어 그의 UCLA 동료인 Arthur Kornberg (1918 - 2007 )는 DNA 를 합성했다. 이러한 발견들은 유전공학을 위해 길을 닦았으며 암과 바이러스감염에 사용되어지는 많은 약들을 위한 기초를 제공하였다. 유전암호를 푸는 것은 DNA와 RNA 의 구조와 이중나선구조의 구성을 파악하는 것에 달려 있다. Ochoa 와 Kornberg 는 1959년 생리학 또는 의학 분야의 노벨상을 나누어가졌으며, Watson 과 Crick 은 1962 년에 상을 받았다.

 

 

 

The dramatic story of James Watson and Francis Crick's discovery was chronicled in Watson's book The Double Helix and the movie The Race for the Double Helix.

 

Adenine and guanine are both made up of double-ringed nitrogen bases, while thymine and cytosine are made of single rings.

 

The researcher Rosalind Franklin (1920 - 1958 ), a close collaborator of Watson and Crick who showed them the first x-ray diffraction pictures of DNA and often critiqued their work, died before the Nobel Prize was awarded.