They were hardly modest, these two brash young scientists who in 1953 declared to patrons of the Eagle Pub in Cambridge, England, that they had "found the secret of life." But James Watson and Francis ...

Nearly every cell in the human body contains essentially the same genetic information, yet different cells activate different ...

DNA aptamers are powerful molecular tools in biosensing, bioimaging and therapeutics. However, a limited understanding of their tertiary structures and binding mechanisms hinders their further ...

Polymerase chain reaction (PCR) is a workhorse for quantifying nucleic acids across a range of applications, including biomanufacturing and clinical research for viral titer, vector copy number, ...

James D. Watson, whose role as co-discoverer of the structure of the DNA molecule in 1953 made him one of the key figures in the rise of molecular biology as well as the obvious choice to be first ...

We’re celebrating 180 years of Scientific American. Explore our legacy of discovery and look ahead to the future. In 1957, just four years after Francis Crick and other scientists solved the riddle of ...

Scientists already knew that heredity depended on something physical by the early 1950s, but they still did not fully understand what that substance looked like or how it worked. DNA had been ...