Science: Nucleic Nobelmen

Before such adventurous chemists as Gerhard Schramm even tried to manufacture nucleic acid, they had to understand how its giant molecules are put together, how they function as the essence of life on earth. Last week one American and two British scientists won the 1962 Nobel Prize for Medicine for working out the complex structure of the most vital kind of nucleic acid, and for explaining how its structure enables it to control the heredity of all living creatures.

The new Nobel Laureates are Francis Harry Compton Crick, 46, of Britain’s Cambridge University; Chicago-born James Dewey Watson, 34, who worked with Crick and is now a professor of biology at Harvard; and Maurice Hugh Frederick Wilkins, 46, deputy director of the biophysics laboratory at King’s College, London. None of them is a doctor of medicine; Wilkins is a physicist, the others are biologists. Between them they will share about $49,650.

Until they won their joint award, just about the only thing the three researchers had in common was an interest in the molecule of deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA), the kind of nucleic acid that controls the reproduction of most living cells. California’s famed chemist, Nobelman Linus Pauling, had suggested that this monster molecule, containing hundreds of thousands, or even millions of atoms, might be built in a spiral. Crick, Watson and Wilkins were among the many scientists who eagerly tested Pauling’s theory.

Magpie’s Hut. Crick and Watson did their work in a shabby shack sandwiched between the imposing academic buildings on the flower-bordered lawns of Cambridge. In one corner of this laboratory (known locally as The Hut), they had a magpie’s nest of old books and model molecules strung like mobiles from the ceiling. Debonair and carefully dressed, Crick always managed to look incongruous there; Watson, tieless, rumpled and far more casual in his dress, fitted the picture perfectly. New Zealand-born Wilkins, tall, blond and courtly in the British manner, worked with Dr. Rosalind Franklin (who died in 1958) in a laboratory in London.

The basic tool used by both groups was X-ray diffraction, which produces enigmatic pictures than can be interpreted to show the structure of invisible molecules. Wilkins made the pictures of DNA himself; Watson and Crick interpreted X-ray pictures made by others, some by Wilkins. Both groups came to similar conclusions: that the DNA molecule is a spiral (as Pauling said), but that it is a double spiral, like a winding staircase with steps made of submolecules (nucleotides) arranged in pairs.

New Life. Determination of DNA’s structure was as important to studies of the secrets of life as was the splitting of the atom to physics. The thousands of rungs connecting the helices are made up of nucleotides put together in a definite order. This order is a code that determines whether a particular germ cell will develop into a mouse or a man. The chromosomes that dictate heredity are, essentially, chains of DNA. When one of these vital molecules in an animal cell is altered by radiation, chemicals, or in any other way, the result may be the aberrant growth that is called cancer—which is why Dr. Wilkins is now visiting at Manhattan’s Sloan-Kettering Institute for Cancer Research. Since abnormal or defective DNA molecules may cause other innate defects or disease, pioneers on today’s frontiers of biochemistry and molecular medicine hope some day to reverse some human disorders by supplying tailor-made, corrective DNA.