1953
Watson and Crick were the men who found the secret to life! ...No really! They did! On Feb. 28, 1956, Watson and Crick had figured out the structure of deoxyribonucleic acid, DNA. And that structure — a "double helix" that can "unzip" to make copies of itself — confirmed suspicions that DNA carries life's hereditary information.
By working with previously drawn and hypothesized structures of DNA, Waston and Crick based their stucture off of them. Thinking that one structure was too small and the other, the chemicals weren't right, they developed the idea that DNA had a double helix instead of a triple helix, as proposed before. They also distinguished the bases of DNA: adenine (purine) with thymine (pyrimidine), and guanine (purine) with cytosine (pyrimidine). Not only did they discover the true structure of DNA, they opened the flood gates of the scientifict community. With the statement, "It has not escaped our notice that the specific pairing we have postulated immediately suggests a possible copying mechanism for the genetic material." Without even knowing it, Watson and Crick proposed the idea of clononing.
