Welcome to the Witness History Podcast from the BBC World Service. In this program, first broadcast in 2010,

the Weezer Dalgo is telling us the story of two scientists who published a paper outlining their remarkable new discovery, the structure of DNA.

April 25, 1953, Nature.

We wish to suggest a structure for the sort of dioxyribonucleic acid DNA.

This sort has novel features which are of considerable biological interest.

With such a memorable understatement, more than half a century ago, the two now most famous biologists of the 20th century,

the American Jim Watson and the Britain Francis Crick, published a short paper in the scientific journal Nature,

describing their discovery and what they'd found was the structure of life itself.

We saw, you know, that was all one Saturday morning with a boy that's the answer.

So the answer was very, very simple.

It was overnight we had the idea and it only took a few days to build a model. We actually built couple of models.

What they'd found was the now famous double helix, the molecular structure of DNA, the chemical substance out of which our genes are made.

And how living things reproduce themselves.

We went from really not knowing where we were until a total answer all within a couple of hours or an hour or so.

I thought, gee, this is beautiful.

And, you know, could it be this true because it was just a pretty structure.

It's beautiful. You could describe it in a small amount of space, the whole essence of the thing.

You know, it didn't take much to comprehend.

So that's why, you know, our paper to nature was, you know, a page long paper, a tiny paper.

James Watson and Francis Crick were working at the Cavendish Laboratory at Cambridge University.

A young lab assistant there, Mike Fuller, helped them to build the model of what they discovered.

A giant replica of the double helix, two strands coiled around each other, like a gently twisting ladder.

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