The stuff we’re made of by Keith Sands

Two men walk into a pub... It sounds like the beginning of a joke. Two men walk into a pub and one of them says - "We've just found the secret of life..."

Well, the pub was the Eagle, in Cambridge, the date was Feb. 28th 1953, and the men were British biochemist Francis Crick and his American colleague James Watson. They worked at the Cavendish laboratories down the road. And they were not exaggerating. Soon their names were known not just to scientists, but to the wider world, and biology had changed beyond recognition.

What they had found was the structure of dioxyribonucleic acid (DNA), the substance which is in every cell in our body and carries the genetic code for all living things. If not exactly the stuff we're made of, it's the stuff that makes the stuff we're made of.

A few months after their excited announcement in the pub, they would publish a rather more tentative article in the journal Nature. Hidden away near the end was a single, cautious sentence which scientists regard as the understatement of the century : "It has not escaped our notice that the specific pairing we have postulated immediately suggests a possible copying mechanism for the genetic material." Translated into less scientific language? Well, "We've found the secret of life!" might just do it.

A design for life
The beauty of their discovery was hidden in that modest sentence in their article. They had not just found the structure of a complex molecule, in the days before electron microscopes (Watson worked by cutting out cardboard shapes and fitting them together), but they had guessed that the form and function were linked. In finding the shape, they had discovered how DNA worked - how the genetic code is passed on. And they were proved right. The double helix of DNA (a shape famous enough to have been made into jewellery and perfume bottles) unravels into two strands and makes copies of itself. In this way, the DNA instructs our cells to produce more cells, each containing an exact copy of the original code. "It's beautiful, so beautiful!" - as Watson was later to remark.

A detective story
The tale of the race to find DNA has all the ingredients of a detective story. Colourful characters, human error, false clues, and academic competition all played a part, as rival teams of scientists converged on the elusive answer. And, as in a good detective story, the answer surprised everyone with its elegance and simplicity.

An unsung heroine
In stories like this, we like a moment when the scientist shouts "eureka!" and the DNA story has one. In fact, this moment excites controversy to this day. At King's College, London, Watson saw anX-ray crystallography picture of DNA ("Exposure 51") taken by the brilliant English scientist Rosalind Franklin. Franklin did not mix easily in the male-dominated environment of the labs, and it was her boss Maurice Wilkins (not on good terms with Franklin) who showed Exposure 51 to Watson, without Franklin's knowledge.

Franklin's photograph was Watson's "eureka" moment, when out of many possible shapes for DNA, he narrowed it down to the double helix. He sketched the shape on a scrap of paper and headed back to Cambridge "with pulse racing" to get back to work with his cardboard. The role of Franklin and Exposure 51 was not fully credited at the time, and she is an icon for female scientists to this day who feel that her work was undervalued by her male colleagues.

Rosalind Franklin died of cancer tragically young, and so was not to share the Nobel Prize with Crick, Watson and Wilkins in 1962.

Science fiction becomes science fact
More than fifty years on, DNA is not only inside us, it's all around us. Genetics is big news. Debates rage over the ethics of cloning, the safety of genetically-modified vegetables, the right of insurance companies to gather genetic data about their clients. DNA fingerprinting is already used by police. A few years ago, the British arm of the Human Genome Project won a court case preventing private companies from patenting genetic discoveries. A rogue Italian scientist and a bizarre cult were claiming that the first human clones had already been born.

We hear a lot about the dark side of genetics, but medical researchers are optimistic that our new knowledge of the human genome will bring huge medical advances. In 2003, the Eagle pub unveiled a metal plaque to celebrate that famous lunchtime in 1953. A modest marker of a moment that is still changing our world.

Vocabulary

5 words/phrases from the text:

prove: establish the truth
clue: something that directs one to the solution of a problem
elusive: difficult to grasp or find
icon: an image that is worshipped
plaque: an inscribed plate placed on a monument, etc.

Exercise one.

Vocabulary gap fill. Now use the 5 words/phrases to fill the gaps in the sentences below:

The police are examining the crime scene, hoping to find a ................
Kylie Minogue has become an ........... for gay men and women all over the world
The house has a ........... on the door saying "Wordsworth lived here"
I have a photograph to .............. I have been to London
The paparazzi agreed that she was the most .............. actress they had tried to photograph.

Exercise two.

Comprehension. Decide whether these statements are TRUE or FALSE according to the text.

DNA was discovered in the fifties
The design of some perfume bottles was inspired by DNA
Rosalind Franklin and Watson were colleagues
Female scientists think Franklin deserved more fame
Private businesses in the UK are allowed to patent genetic discoveries

Grammar.

Reported questions

When we report what people say, we usually change the tense of the verbs to reflect that we are reporting - not giving direct speech. This pattern is followed when we report questions and there are also other important changes between direct questions and reported questions.

Yes/no questions

Direct question: "Do you like working in teams?" Reported question: He asked if I like working in teams.

When we report yes/no questions we use ‘if' or ‘whether'.

Direct question: "Did you enjoy the party?" Reported question: She asked me whether I'd enjoyed the party.

The tense of the verb changes as it does in reported speech but we don't use auxiliary verbs. The word order is the same as in an affirmative sentence.

Questions with a question word

Direct question: "What time does the train leave?" Reported question: He asked what time the train left.

When there is a question word (what, where, why, who, when, how) we use that question word in the reported question but there is no auxiliary verb and the word order is like an affirmative sentence (‘what time the train left' not ~~He asked me what time did the train leave.~~)

Look at some more examples:

Direct question Reported question
"Who did you see?" She asked me who I'd seen.
"Where did you go to school?" He asked me where I'd gone to school.
"Why are you crying?" She asked him why he was crying.

Notice that the reported questions do not have a question mark at the end.

Indirect questions

Similar to reported questions are indirect questions.

Can you tell me what time the train leaves? NOT ~~Can you tell me what time does the train leave?~~
I'd love to know what he said to her. NOT ~~I'd love to know what did he say to her.~~