This is the Nature Pastcast, each month raiding nature's archive and looking at key moments in science.

In this show, we're going back to the 1950s.

I've got the world on a string From the editorial and publishing offices of Nature

Macmillan & Co. St. Martin Street, London.

Nature, April 25, 1953.

What a world, what a life. April 25, 1953.

Page 734, Microsomal Particles of Normal Cows Milk.

Page 737, molecular structure of nucleic acids, a structure for deoxyribos nucleic acid,

J.D. Watson and F.H.C. Cric.

Lucky me. Can't you see I'm in love? Walking into their lab and seeing this double helix, of course it looked familiar because

all of the stator of the dimensions were the stuff that we got from our x-ray diffraction patterns.

So it looked right and it was sheer elegance.

I'm Raymond Gosling co-author of one of the papers in Nature, 1993, April, on the structure of DNA.

My name is Melinda Baldwin. I'm a historian of science at the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

I think a lot of people don't necessarily know that there were three DNA papers instead of just the one.

And I think the big reason that the Watson and Crick paper became the one that we do remember is because that's the one where the structure of DNA was published.

And I think as a consequence, the second two papers have really fallen out a bit of consciousness.

The Franklin and Gosling paper was primarily about crystallographic work.

Page 740, Rosalind E. Franklin and R.G. Gosling, King's College London London, molecular configuration in sodium thymonucid.

I'm Georgina Ferry. I'm a science writer and author. At the time, x-ray crystallography of large

molecules, the sort of molecules that you get in living bodies, was still a very, very small field.

It had really started in the 1930s. Everybody was interested in the

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