This podcast originally aired in April 2013 on the 60th anniversary of Watson and Crick's famous DNA paper.

In it, you'll hear the voice of Ray Gosling, who also worked on the structure of DNA.

Gosling died in May 2015, aged 88.

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 I'm in love.

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. Cric.

Lucky me, can't you see a moon?

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.

Got the string around my finger.

What a word.

My name is Melinda Baldwin.

I'm a historian of science at the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

...