And there I met Francis Crick.

Now, that is not Intelligent Design not from Francis Crick.

Far enough from the crick so you won't get too many mosquitoes.

But the last article in that issue was written by Francis Crick of DNA fame.

And so Crick and I, you know, started building models, and I'd learned a little chemistry, but not enough.

And certainly, neither Crick or I were chemists, so we tried to build a model. And he knew, Francis knew Wilkins.

Francis Crick, the co discoverer of the structure of DNA with Jim Watson, once joked about what he called Orgel's Second Rule.

Nobel laureate James Watson opens TED2005 with the frank and funny story of how he and his research partner, Francis Crick, discovered the structure of DNA.

So Mendel had this idea of a gene as an abstract thing, and Darwin built a whole theory that depended on them existing, and then Watson and Crick actually looked and found one.

Because this Friday, 50 years ago, Watson and Crick found the structure of DNA, and that is almost as important a date as the 12th of February when we first mapped ourselves, but anyway, we'll get to that.

And as Francis Crick pointed out, nine years after discovering DNA with Mr. Watson, that life itself has to have growth as a precondition it has to have free energy, sunlight and it needs to be an open system of chemicals.

LONDON On April 25, 1953, Francis Crick and James Watson published a one page paper that many believed would revolutionize biological research. Building on the work of Rosalind Franklin and Maurice Wilkins, they had discovered DNA s double helix structure, providing the first glimpse into how organisms inherit and store biological information.

And when Watson and Crick in the '50s first decoded this beautiful double helix that we know as the DNA molecule very long, complicated molecule we then started on this journey to understand that inside of that DNA is a language that determines the characteristics, our traits, what we inherit, what diseases we may get.

Since James D. Watson and Francis Crick uncovered DNA s structure in 1953, a massive amount of available genetic data has been identified, and novel forms of scientific organization and modes of working have emerged. As a result, genetics has brought science to the brink of a new era of enlightenment, in which individuals are understood in terms of the relationships among their unique genomic data.

LONDON Fifty one years ago, James Watson, Maurice Wilkins, and Francis Crick were awarded the Nobel Prize in Medicine for their discovery of DNA s structure a breakthrough that heralded the age of the gene. Since then, the field of genetics has advanced significantly, particularly as a result of the global Human Genome Project, which in 2003 identified all of the roughly 23,000 genes and three billion chemical base pairs in human DNA in order to screen for many rare diseases.