FIFTY years ago today, Francis Crick, a Cambridge University physicist, walked into the city’s Eagle pub with his collaborator, James Watson, and announced: “We have discovered the secret of life”.

When their scientific paper on the structure of DNA was published in Nature two months later, its significance was largely overlooked. The verdict of Sir Peter Medawar, the British immunologist and Nobel laureate, changed that.

“This complex of discoveries is the greatest achievement of science in the 20th century,” he said.

The discovery of the double-helix structure of DNA, which allows the molecule to replicate and lay down the blueprint for every living organism, has revolutionised science. Without it, some of the most promising, and controversial, areas of medicine, including genetic screening and human cloning, would never have been possible. Watson has been no stranger to controversy since the discovery, when he was 25.

While he and Crick were quick to claim credit for the double helix, they have been accused of belittling the work of Rosalind Franklin, of King’s College London, whose X-ray photographs of the DNA molecule were crucial.

Watson was shown Franklin’s work, without her knowledge, by her superior, Maurice Wilkins, with whom the pair eventually shared the Nobel Prize, but he has never accepted that she played an equal role. In his 1968 book The Double Helix, published ten years after Franklin’s death from ovarian cancer, he described her as a frigid, badly dressed and charmless bluestocking who did not deserve any more credit.

Many believe she was treated badly by Watson, Crick and Wilkins because of her gender, though she was not considered for the Nobel because the prize is awarded only to living scientists.

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