Abstract
For James Watson, ‘A structure this pretty just had to exist’.1 For Maurice Wilkins, ‘The structure was too perfect to be wrong’.2 Horace Judson, in his magisterial history of molecular biology The Eighth Day of Creation, described it as ‘flawlessly beautiful … truly for the first time at the ultimate biological level structure had become one with function’.3 And, ever since Watson and Crick's letter to Nature of April 25 1953 – with its famous throwaway line ‘it has not escaped our notice that the specific pairing we have postulated immediately suggests a possible copying mechanism for the genetic material’ – science has been seduced by the elegant simplicity of the double helix into supposing that if we could only decode its genetic instructions, we would understand the programme that makes an organism.4
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