At the centre of Rosalind Franklin’s tombstone in London’s Willesden Jewish Cemetery is the word “scientist”. This is followed by the inscription, “Her research and discoveries on viruses remain of ...

“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 ...

Georgina Ferry is a science writer based in Oxford, UK. A revised edition of her biography Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin has just been published by Bloomsbury Reader. Until that time, biologists had still ...

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 ...

A team of molecular biologists have uncovered how one particular mechanism uses energy to ensure proper histone placement onto DNA to form chromatin. The genetic material of our cells -- DNA -- exists ...

One of the most important milestones in modern science, does April 25 also mark the date of an intellectual heist? As has been well-documented, a third person contributed to the discovery — the ...

James D. Watson, whose co-discovery of the twisted-ladder structure of DNA in 1953 helped light the long fuse on a revolution in medicine, crimefighting, genealogy and ethics, has died, according to ...

James Dewey Watson, a molecular biologist whose work helped decode the structure of DNA, died on November 6, 2025, at a hospice in East Northport, N.Y. He was 97 years old. Watson was best known for ...