“The laws of inheritance are quite unknown,” Charles Darwin acknowledged in 1859. The discovery of DNA’s shape altered how we conceived of life itself. The X-ray crystallography by Rosalind Franklin ...

Caption main figure: The rigid base-pair model is forced, using 28 constraints (indicated by red spheres), into a lefthanded superhelical path that mimics the DNA conformation in the nucleosome.

James Dewey Watson, whose co-discovery of the twisted-ladder structure of DNA in 1953 helped launch a revolution in biology and medicine, died Thursday at age 97. He died in hospice care after a brief ...