Chapter 7 Summary

When Watson started working at the Cavendish Laboratory at Cambridge, he discovered that he loved it there, particularly talking with Francis Crick, who shared Watson's enthusiasm for DNA. Watson was no help with the X-ray experiments he was supposed to be working on, but Crick taught him about crystallography and about how Pauling discovered his ?-helix structure, by fitting together models of groups of atoms that liked to link together. The DNA structure was certain to be more complex than the protein structure Pauling had discovered. Crick and Watson assumed that the nucleotides, or components of DNA, were fit together in a regular way. This would be the simplest model of DNA structure, so they chose it as a starting point. There are four types of nucleotides in DNA, and their order must be complex, since that's how DNA carries information. However, Watson...