Literary and Historical Notes:

It was on this day in 1953 that James Watson and Francis Crick discovered the structure of the DNA molecule. They were working in a lab in Cambridge, England, where they didn't even have the right equipment to examine DNA. That equipment was located at King's College in London. They learned that a woman named Rosalind Franklin was taking X-ray pictures of DNA there, and they decided that the only way to discover the structure was to look at those pictures.
Watson got to know Rosalind Franklin's lab partner, Maurice Wilkins, and one night he persuaded Wilkins to show him one of the X-ray pictures that Franklin had taken of a DNA molecule. Watson took a train back to Cambridge after seeing the picture, and he made a sketch of the molecule on a newspaper. When he got back to his lab, he and Crick spent several days building theoretical models of the molecule. They hit on the correct structure on this day in 1953. Once they realized what they had accomplished, they went to the local bar to celebrate.
Toasting their discovery, Watson suddenly shouted, "We have discovered the secret of life!" They would go on to win the Nobel Prize for their discovery.
And it's the birthday of the man who almost beat Watson and Crick to the discovery of DNA, the chemist Linus Pauling, (books by this author) born in Oswego, Oregon (1901). He studied chemistry at the Oregon Agricultural College and then won a Guggenheim Fellowship which he used to go abroad to study the new field of quantum mechanics with some of the most important physicists of the era.
At the time, quantum mechanics was revolutionizing the way scientists understood the nature of individual atoms and molecules. Using his new knowledge, Pauling became the first chemist to examine individual molecules with X-rays, and he showed how the various properties of a chemical, its color and texture and hardness, are a result of its molecular structure. He won a Nobel Prize for his work in 1954.
Linus Pauling said, "The best way to have a good idea is to have a lot of ideas."