Seventy years ago today, on April 25, Watson and Crick published their paper about the double helix structure of DNA — “Molecular Structure of Nucleic Acids: A Structure for Deoxyribose Nucleic Acid”. That paper probably contains the best closing line of any scientific paper anywhere: “It has not escaped our notice that the specific pairing we have postulated immediately suggests a possible copying mechanism for the genetic material”.<\/p>\n
It also hadn’t escaped the notice of Rosalind Franklin, the person who led the actual X-ray diffraction experiments that made this structure evident (which Watson and Crick were shown without her permission). But that’s another story.<\/p>\n
Interestingly, exactly eight years later, on April 25, the first patent for a fully integrated circuit was issued to Robert Noyce. Perhaps one day our future robot overlords will look on this coincidence with amusement.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Seventy years ago today, on April 25, Watson and Crick published their paper about the double helix structure of DNA — “Molecular Structure of Nucleic Acids: A Structure for Deoxyribose Nucleic Acid”. That paper probably contains the best closing line of any scientific paper anywhere: “It has not escaped our notice that the specific pairing … Continue reading “Coincidence”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25395"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=25395"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25395\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":25396,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25395\/revisions\/25396"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=25395"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=25395"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=25395"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}