After the Double Helix ... What?(Structure of Deoxyribonucleic Acid) (Report‪)‬

ABSTRACT When Watson and Crick puzzled out DNA's structure, everyone understood that science was poised to take a new direction. Watson and Crick knew that DNA controlled the creation of proteins, the building blocks of organisms, but did not understand how it worked. They and other researchers in the field were aware that RNA played a critical role, but, again, they did not understand the relation between DNA, RNA, and proteins. In many ways, the search for the answers to these questions is as fascinating and revealing as the search for the structure of DNA. They faced a problem that was completely new to science: How does one array of molecules somehow direct the assembly of a completely different set? They had to determine how to formulate the problem; only then would they be able to seek out the chemical processes that could provide the answer they needed. The search reveals a picture of talented, resourceful, and highly motivated people who struggled to formulate conceptions of the mechanism they sought, make decisions about which empirical data to seek, and try one idea after another until, with luck, hard work, and the passage of time, they puzzled out the answer.