IU graduate student made DNA discovery 50 years ago

Even now it's hard to believe that a repeating pattern of four different molecules represented by the letters A, T, G and C could represent the key to life. Billions of times over the pattern repeats and changes, spiraling upward like a freestanding staircase. \nThe double-helix structure of DNA is entrenched in our lives, mostly subconsciously unless you were studying for a biology exam last night. Almost every episode of the television drama "C.S.I." uses DNA evidence to solve a crime; politicians and scientists debate the ethics of cloning; and almost every medical advance relates to our greater understanding of genes and how they work.\nAs routine as it is now, 50 years ago this week, the discovery of that spiral staircase structure by IU graduate James Watson and Francis Crick made this understanding of DNA possible.\nFor biology, it was "like finding the Holy Grail and bringing it home," said IU biology professor, Rudy Raff.\nHis study of genetics at IU helped pave the way for Watson. \nNineteen-year-old Watson arrived in Bloomington in 1947, lured by a $900 fellowship and the opportunity to work with prominent geneticists on his Ph.D. He did research in the laboratory of Salvador Luria, who would later win the Nobel Prize for his understanding of viruses. \nFormer IU genetics professor Tracy Sonneborn, now deceased, told stories of how Watson took almost no notes, and Sonneborn figured that he would not do well. When Watson aced his exams, Sonneborn asked him how he did it. Apparently Watson only wrote down references and spent his time in the library reading the original material.\nBut Watson was not always the stellar scientist. In his own essay, Watson indicates that his adviser had written or at least significantly revised most of his Ph.D. thesis in 1950. He was not necessarily gifted in the laboratory, as a story about Watson accidentally attaching a Bunsen burner to a water line instead of a gas line suggests.\nBut his later work with Crick at the Cavendish laboratories at Cambridge University led to the DNA structure in 1953 and the Nobel Prize in 1962. \nIU chemistry professor John Richardson described the significance of the DNA structure as a clue to the foundation of life so that cells could "pass on what they have learned." \nRichardson worked in Watson's lab as a graduate student at Harvard University in the 1960s. He sees Watson as a man who could be difficult and awkward to talk to, but someone who was always supportive of his students.\nFrom his days in England, Watson kept a tradition of tea with his research group at 4 p.m. every day, which included chocolate cookies. Richardson also recalls Watson giving him a "kick in the pants" when necessary and being upfront with his criticism. \nBut certain character traits among the "Jimisms" that Richardson described did not make him popular with his colleagues. \n"At national meetings he was notorious for sitting up near the front and when he didn't like what was going on, he would take out a newspaper and very obviously read it to show that he was bored," Richardson said. "And he was very easily bored."\nHowever Watson might rub people the wrong way, no one can deny his contributions to biology even to this day. He has continued to be involved in emerging areas of the field including being head of the Human Genome Project from 1988 to 1992.\nAnd the legacy of the DNA double helix has been a foundation for modern biology. "There's nothing that goes on in biology that doesn't include molecular genetics," Raff said.\nIn his personal account of the discovery, "The Double Helix," Watson ends the book with the statement "I was 25 and too old to be unusual." \nMaybe he wasn't unusual to the women on that Paris street that day, but his legacy will live on for years to come.