[Music] what is the force at the heart of Life what is the engine that drives it forward that links all living things from the smallest to the largest that links families through the generations and looks in personality in health and in sickness scientists had searched for the answer for hundreds of years until 1953 when two young men ran into a British pub shouting that they discovered the secret of life this is if you see the most beautiful girl in the world and you're going to see her again you know it was great the secret was DNA a microscopic strand of only four chemicals but capable of such infinite variety that it carries the blueprint and directs the growth of every living thing on Earth the genetic Revolution was about to [Music] begin for the next 50 years whole new fields of Science and Technology burst into being as our understanding of the genetic code buried in DNA grew going to transform everything we just the be surface has been SC will never be the same there were hopes for healthier lives that stuff kept me alive and keeping me alive right now Promises of an end to inherited disease I think I've mapped a gene for inherited breast cancer cancer is a solvable problem I don't have to say anything I'm going to cure cancer the excitement of Discovery dizzying and sometimes when I start to talk about it I get giddy science is like falling in love I just want to work all the time I don't want to go home and the fear of scientists playing God contamination the most dangerous and outrageous experiment worried that could crawl out of the laboratory such as a Frankenstein we don't play God who will even the course of human evolution May soon be ours to control this is potentially the most important organized scientific effort that the human species has ever mounted aspects of society will never be the same again this is the personal story of a scientists whose strugg struggles and breakthroughs are Transforming Our biological future the first generation to live and work in the age of DNA this was a hard I want to go home Jo were contaminated the most intense hostility tempestuous discussion selfish bastard it was like running a marathon Race that lasts for 4 years it's absolutely fascinating the DNA Story begins more than half a century ago with a group of brilliant competitive and temperamental young scientists all driven to uncover the same elusive mystery and with Francis Crick and James Watson two complete unknowns who somehow found what they were all looking for the secret of life [Music] to appreciate what Watson and Crick did we have to imagine we're in the 1950s and all that is known about life is what can be seen through a [Music] microscope cells divide them they divide and divide again until somehow they eventually form a plant a penguin or a person but how how do the cells know what to do most believed there was a magical life force that would forever elude science but some had faith in a more rational answer to tell the story of how the extraordinary breakthrough was made one has to come to Cambridge University in England it's a place where many great discoveries have been made during the past 700 years but if the place has the Hallmarks of greatness Watson and cck did not today Francis Crick has a house on the edge of the Mojave desert in California and he's become a little reclusive when it comes to discussing the early days of DNA some say it's because he's ill others say he finds the whole subject uncomfortable or maybe he's just busy with his more recent work studying the chemical nature of Dreams whatever the reason he rarely gives interviews but Jim Watson does today he's 74 years old world famous and a multi-millionaire but he was just a 22-year-old junior researcher when he set out to explain life in scientific [Applause] terms still all these years later one gets a sense of the Brash young man who is planning to overthrow the old ways of thinking you know if you looked at Cambridge you know we were products of God the statement that uh like life could be understood finally in terms of molecules uh people would say it was hypothesis Francis and I would United us is you know we just thought religion was wrong not necessar silly but wrong there was no God and uh you know humans had to make our own rules and not just obey rules because someone said they came from God you realize that you know the people you know thought we were slightly crazy and but uh we didn't think we were we thought the other people were dull dull or not the other people at Cambridge didn't hold out much hope of Watson and Crick doing anything at all let alone finding the secret of life Watson this geeky American kid with his friend cck who acted like some Dandy English gentleman a splendid talker who had never quite managed to finish his PhD they were seen as lazy Jokers but they shared the same dream like other scientists of the time they believed that there was some kind of a script or instruction that told cells what to do the search for this script focused on the chromosomes right in the middle of every cell but that was as far as they could see still it was known that chromosomes were made of two discrete ingredients proteins and DNA most scientists expected to find the script in the proteins because they're really complicated and made up of lots of different chemicals so they distracted the best minds but Watson and cck decided to look at the simpler DNA DNA is composed of only four ingredients they thought if they could work out how the of these four ingredients were arranged in physical space they might be able to work out what they did they had a hunch that the three-dimensional structure of DNA might reveal its [Music] function but while Watson and Crick had never found the structure of anything 60 Mi away in London worked another pair of scientists who had rosn Franklin and Morris Wilkins Rosalyn Franklin is often seen as the heroine of this story she was Jewish from a wealthy background and had attended the best schools in England she had chosen to become an expert in taking photographs of things that are too small to see she's been called the dark Lady of DNA as she died without Ever Getting credit for her part in the discovery some say she was betrayed by her colleague at Kings College London if you go to Kings along a remote Corridor and down these stairs 50 years later you'll still find that colleague Mars [Music] Wilkins and on the walls of his office are Clues which hint at what he's been through during the second world war he helped to create the atom bomb the night it was dropped on Hiroshima he was at a party celebrating the culmination of that work when a man came up to him and said something that would change his life it was been Monday when the bomb went off and he said I uh call it Black Monday I always hoped it wouldn't work I sort of stood there and felt a bit small and uh then said yes I think you're think you're quite right but it did work and so we are living uh kind of in the aftermaths of that disillusioned with the science of death he chose the science of Life instead and that's why he decided to look for the structure of DNA here is one of the X-ray generators we're using in this work here is the X-ray tube wilkins's strange Contraption is in fact a kind of camera it's used in a technique called x-ray crystallography a crystalline form of DNA is placed inside the camera and when x-rays are fired through it they scatter onto photographic paper and form a regular pattern it's a bit like shining a spotlight at a chandelier light hits the crystals and then defract onto the wall now imagine you can't see the chandelier you can only see the light on the wall from that you have to guess the shape of the chandelier and that's what these photographs are taken by Mars Wilkins they were the first clue to the structure of DNA but his boss realized he was on to something big and decided to bring in an expert rosin Franklin suddenly it wasn't just Wilkins taking photographs of DNA so Watson and Crick were looking for the structure of DNA in Cambridge and Wilkins and Franklin were doing the same in London but there was someone else lurking out there someone with a formidable reputation [Music] the brilliant American chemist lonus Pauling he died years ago but his son witnessed the dramatic events and we found him in the middle of Wales miles from the nearest town in this house is Peter Pauling it's very often in science that the times are right and people have different people have the same idea you know at roughly the same time and getting in first somehow is important they were in a race Peter Pauling knew them all and watched this piece of History unfold his father who was about to become a double Nobel Prize winner certainly had the best credentials P did very few things by accident he did things he had a reason for doing things TOA DNA was just a substance like sodium chloride lonus Pauling looked for the structures of many molecules and he usually found them too that's why in the world of 1950s science he was one of the most recognizable figures I like to uh uh understand the world I like to learn about new ideas but I also uh like very much having new ideas myself or making discoveries myself this pleases me immensely he had a different approach he was going to guess the structure by building ball and spoke models that looked like a child's Tinker toy set the balls represent the atoms the spokes determine how far apart the atoms must be from each other according to the laws of physics lonus Pauling would work at seeing how they fit together solving a structure this way was like doing a three-dimensional jigsaw puzzle so Watson and cck had a choice to do the painstaking x-ray work or try their luck building models like lonus Pauling for them the choice was simple to build models it was only a question when you started to build build models would you do it after you collected uh years of experimental data or would you try and build the the model with a minimum of data they went for model building with the minimum of data some might say a more leisurely approach but that was the Cambridge style and Watson and Crick seem to be the epitome of that whing away the hours chatting about the secret of life people would laugh at us and say oh we weren't doing experiments just take these long walks and lunch and uh constantly talking instead of experimental Happy Days people see you do no experiments you were sort of thought you know we were parasites other people did the work and we got the glory uh but the truth was you know uh uh complicated in fact Watson and Crick were asking all the right questions what was common to all forms of life and uh what finally seemed to be come into all forms of life was there was a script we've been thinking it was DNA but we didn't know the shape of the script and uh always the big problem was the copying who copied there weren't any you know little monks inside the cell copying the script by not getting bogged down in the details of experiments their minds were free to concentrate on the Big [Music] Ideas three teams three different approaches and Watson and Crick weren't the favorites I would say that Watson and cek were number two and at that time I would put my money on this crowd Kings College London should have been the place to find the structure of DNA Kings had Cutting Edge Equipment and a team of dedicated experts working on the problem but trouble was brewing while Mars Wilkins blended into the Shadows rosn Franklin was making a big impression on those around her she was uh of of medium height and had black hair which she wore straight uh just in no particular Arrangement but she had the most startling dark eyes which showed the intense nature of her personality most of the young men who worked with her were half in love with her one of these young men was Raymond goling at the time he was a lowely lab assistant working for rosn Franklin looking back on it I think I was very privileged to have been there uh I only wish I had known at the time that it was that important I might have remembered more or worked harder and who knows I might have tried building a few models secretly model building was in the air but her view was you could build models all day but how did you prove prove which one was right on the other hand if you made the measurements you did all the corrective geometry and you put them into the equations you would let the data speak for itself and out of that would come a definitive structure but there was a problem Wilkins was under the impression that DNA was his project their boss had told Franklin it was hers no mention was ever made of the fact that will was the overarching uh person concerned in the lab she certainly felt she was coming in she was taking over that defection [Music] work so at opposite ends of the corridor Mars Wilkins and rosn Franklin worked on DNA occasionally they would announce their results to the [Music] department one after afternoon in November 1951 Franklin was to reveal her latest DNA data to a select group of King's College scientists and one Outsider well this is where I came in early November 1951 to hear Roslin Franklin talk about her newest results on DNA and uh I was terribly Keen to know what she'd done because uh I wanted to build a model and I thought I would learn possibly something about the structure there was probably you know 30 people in the room and you know I slipped in so you know was insiders you know like a spy and uh Roslin you know was seemingly much in control I generally never took notes my memory was good having taken in as much as he could of the X-ray data Watson rushed back to Cambridge to tell cck what he'd heard for the next two weeks they worked on a model and on November 28th 1951 Watson and Crick announced that they had found the structure of [Music] DNA Francis rang me up and said we made a model can't have a look so I went to the others and collected them we all went up it was a pretty ugly structure Francis liked that I don't know you know he caught up the people with Kings and said we' done something clever and uh I was a bit worried feeling apprehensive the king's team left for Cambridge rosn Franklin took one look at the model and she laughed at them uh much to their discomfort I think had said oh look you've got it inside out Watson's memory had let him down over how much water was absorbed in the DNA crystals the water content is vital to the structure so their model was a complete disaster rosin was tickled pink she was right the building of a model of a crystal structure was a waste of time until you'd let defraction speak for itself and that was hard work I don't know I mean um one might say well why not not you mean it's an exploration to make a model I mean make a model and if you make a bit of a fool yourself in the process why why you might be be lucky real strange thing about science is how stupid people can be so much of the time and uh so prin and I were really stupid worse than that they'd incurred the Wrath of the London team's boss Sir John Randall who called up Watson and crick's boss sir Lawrence Bragg to complain about their behavior and Bragg was Furious in those days it wasn't gentlemanly to have knowledge of somebody's current unpublished work and to make use of that working on the same problem it was rather like having an affair with his wife I mean it happened but you uh you you didn't really take much credit in doing it Watson and Crick were kicked off the case and even their model building equipment was sent to Kings Watson and cck were officially barred from the race the way should have been open for the king's college team but Mars and Rosland didn't get along with the stakes so high why couldn't they just resolve their differences Morris was so shy that when he was talking to you and he didn't know you he habitually talked at an angle so you might find that you were addressing the back of his head I think scientists in particular tend to be rather uh um well I don't know sort of bottled up with um serious thoughts and uh and uh wonderful theories that uh and uh the secret of life or something he would slide in into a room and and and and and Mumble something and be very diffident about it he was never going to come in and say well I'm glad you've joined my team uh and and and say this is the way we do it spit spot bang uh which had he done would have cleared the air number of these you know he wasn't able to talk to her guy thinks there are a number of people he should have made as the more senior made the effort to bring her into the camp and that uh he sulked in his tent far too often uh I think he knows this and it's haunted him today rosn Franklin is an icon outside a dormitory for female students that bears her name stands her statue the only thing that survives that gives a sense of what she was like are her letters in one that she wrote to her religious father she argues for the importance of Science and understanding the world science for me gives a partial explanation of life in so far as it goes it's based on fact experience and experiment your theories are those which you and many other people find easiest and pleasantest to believe but as far as I can see they have no Foundation other than that they lead to a Pleasant View of life and an exaggerated view of our own importance anyone able to believe in all that religion implies obviously must have such Faith but I maintain that faith in this world is perfectly possible without faith in another world um the picture to me seem to say something about Rosalind Rosalind has um some sometimes seemed a bit sort of heavy in appearance at I mean not always but sometimes and I I thought well it would have been nice if uh she'd been able to sort of trip around on her toes and and look pretty and and cheerful but I think it was it was very sad because uh we had thought we might be all able to join together you see in the scientific work um it's uh two sides to the the the the whole thing [Music] back in Cambridge Watson was down in the dumps banned from working on DNA his dream of showing that it was the secret of life was slipping away but Crick had some good news someone was coming to dinner in Cambridge who could help [Music] them best your favorite that Irwin Char had never intended to help Watson and cck even at 96 years old he's still bitter about what had happened charf was an expert in the chemistry of DNA over dinner Watson and Crick tried to Plum him for information they were fishing really but that get the impression they did all the time I think Watson really was a fisherman I mean he he sort of brought the news to Crick Crick was the is a man who had the ideas well I think we didn't like him because he sort of didn't you know warm up our saying you know you could solve the structure of DNA by model building you know the both shows an extreme contempt for chemistry that was what struck me they were more like children in their behavior yeah he was just a born enemy despite his extreme dislike for them he did explain his chargaff rules that state the relative amounts of the four basic ingredients of DNA by comparing samples from three different species he discovered a strange correlation no matter what the life form the amount of a equal the amount of T and the amount of c equal the amount of G this suggested the chemicals somehow went together in pairs for charf this was an interesting correlation but for Watson and Crick it was the first clue to the structure I think DNA to him was a yeah an objective whose time had not yet [Music] come oh yes good yes there's a uni cam excellent on this desk is the original equipment that helped reveal the structure of DNA so this is the first camera this is the the first DNA it's worth a fortune today I mean putting them in a frame like that they look much better than just sort of lying on a table don't they the x-rays go in here photographic film is put on the inside here then that is put down around the we thought like everything with Morris there's more to it than meets the eye now you want to say something about these These are small scale models Mars had also wanted to build models based on the X-ray data but Rosland had all the best DNA samples had and they weren't talking no one else at Kings really had the imagination to help him said to us once at Kings if anybody did perhaps see the overarching picture Wilkins did because he often said you know we should all wake up we should all try and a number of different things instead of plotting along trying to solve the X-ray defraction pattern because we are in a race it is an important problem and there are other people I mean there was this bogey man sitting in America called lonus poing who already had two Nobel prizes not one and he was thinking about it by now lonus Pauling had turned his full attention to DNA suspiciously this coincided with a certain young Playboy traveling from from California to England to work in Watson and crick's office in those days lonus had a son who was about uh the same ages Watson h and knew Watson and and uh poing came across and came to our lab and he went and stayed with Watson and cck and uh I think he put the fear of God into them that Dad was thinking about this I had to few what was he do doing in the laboratory of his uh father's big competitor I was accused of being a double agent but uh I don't accept that because I'd write to p and just say what I'm doing and he'd write back you know what he was interested in and P was not only writing back to Peter he was busy writing other letters too I wrote to Wilkins at King's College ask in if I could have prints of the photographs that he had obtained but I my effort was not successful back at King's College London they had made an astonishing Discovery the scattered dots of light that suggest how the atoms of DNA might be arranged were coming into sharp Focus Rosland Franklin had taken this the clearest picture yet the x pattern indicated the DNA ingredients are arranged in a spiral what scientists call a helix but rosn Franklin wasn't letting anyone else see it so lonus Pauling never got his hands on this x pattern could he have come up with the right answer without seeing the king's data and of course I hoped we couldn't uh it wasn't until you know about the last day of January that Peter came in after lunch and uh had a manuscript I had a letter from my father in December 52 saying he had proposed a structure for DNA so I told the boys oh they rushed over my stomach sank and I you know I was scared to death so what was going to be in it opened it and read it and they discovered you know that it it it was wrong wonder what cut into Linus pauling's model not only didn't fit the data it also failed to explain anything about what DNA did he had blundered by trying to get the structure with too little information there wasn't any ambig good as to whether lius was right or wrong he said lius is wrong it's you know so we were both pleased and a bit scared because maybe someone at celtech tell lus this is chemical nonsense little do we know that you know no one at Caltech really had the courage to tell lonus he was wrong lonus was like the pope lus wasn't used to people saying he was wrong so I've had a very fortunate life I thought the people at Kings should be relieved so without being asked I said well just take the manuscript down to uh the Kings we're just bubbling over with the fact that we had another chance P had got it wrong and uh we should go into action [Music] fast Watson was still not even supposed to be working on DNA but he took the risk of going to Kings again I didn't have that much time I wanted something to happen now see so I went down and looked for Morris and didn't spot him and someone told me where rosin's office was so I went toward it and uh walked in she wasn't there you I wasn't trying to read the letters on her desk or anything like that but obviously I was looking around and she came in someone had told her that I was looking for her she had a very negative reaction to me and fury was Rising she didn't think I should be there so I got out of the room as fast as possible and then Morris Wilkins had heard I was around and there he was and I said oh I I thought she was going to hit me and he said Oh I thought she was going to do that to me once and uh so I went to he took me to his office and opened a drawer and took out a photo and there it was the cross which I had never seen and which they had basically weren't talking about it it showed this sort of uh X type of um hawo type of um cross pattern which was an indication of a helix is that a big high it is most beautiful photograph you know as if you've SE the most beautiful girl in the world and you're going to see her again you know it was great if I got excited about the results I Ted to pass them on I don't know I think think it uh I didn't feel there was any sort of bombshell in this well the picture kept sort of racing through my brain and uh I wanted to be sure I had it right so I wrote it down it was just a uh super reflection at 3.4 angstroms and boom boom boom no one could look at it and say it's not a helix and the reason that Watson realized that it was a helix so as you get across in the defraction pattern well it just so happened that cck knew this bit of X-ray defraction Theory and had told Watson that an X indicated a helix this wasn't his specialty but crick's mind was able to absorb ideas from many disciplines and now it was paying off and there's going to be a tendency to throw you know I felt you know maybe we'll get the answer you know until then I I didn't feel we were close I thought that picture means we're close well undoubtedly and I think if you ask him he will say that he feels that he did uh if there were any cats to be let out of any bags he he he'd done it well that's is perfectly true but I think this science isn't supposed to be kept in bags no more than cats I mean I don't know what he he means but uh I mean I don't like as as a scientist sort of working away and and sort of saying oh no wasn't tell they other scientists or something I don't think it's the way to be working it's uh science ought to be an open activity in uh so you can work as as as a community yeah have been impossible not to build bottles then after seeing that [Music] picture spring came early to Cambridge in 1953 Watson and Crick were given official permission to return to their work on DNA and by now they had managed to acquire all the information they needed Char's data suggested that the four chemicals in DNA might go together in pairs it was time to see how these pairs would fit together to discover whether the shape of DNA would tell them what it did the Kevin the sh was to build us some tin models and that took too long and uh you know finally in desperation I made some other cardboard I sort of finished the job on Friday and didn't get back into the Cavendish probably until much before 9:30 on Saturday morning so I came in the morning and I began moving them around and I wanted an arrangement you know where I had a big and a small so how did you do it somehow you had to to form link bonds so uh here's uh a and here's T and I wanted this hydrogen to point directly at this nitrogen so I had something like this so then I went to the the pair and I wanted this nitrogen point to this one I went like this whoa they look the same so we had two base pairs identical in shape and boy I could hardly believe it Franklin's photo suggested these pairs had to fit into some kind of Helix and when they saw that the pairs were the same shape they realized that they could stack on top of each other and even put one right on top of the other and they realized that to form a helix they not only stacked on top of each other but they also twisted around like the steps in a spiral staircase onwards and upwards in their minds the double helix structure of DNA emerged so you can have a small one a big one a small one any sequence we knew we could just you know even if we go up to the ceiling we were building a tiny fraction of a [Music] molecule 100 of million of these base pairs in one molecule so unbelievably all United by this either at or ta GC CG all fitting into this wonderful symmetry which we saw the morning of February 28th 1953 [Music] the double helix was a structure that revealed far more about the way life Works than they could ever have dreamed of they'd been looking for something that could divide just like cells do and it was easy to see how a double helix could unwind and form two more double helixes they'd been trying to find out if DNA was the script or instructions for all living things they realized that the millions of G's A's T's and C's must be written in some kind of code the script of life and they even saw how the script could be copied exactly as the double helix unwinds each of the letters forms a new pair and because a always goes with T and G always goes with C the resulting two pieces of DNA are exact copies of the original enabling the script to be passed from cell to cell and and ultimately from generation to generation it was clear now DNA was the molecule that controlled all living things Watson and cck ran straight to the pub where their news was going to be hard to believe it was hard to contain the fact that you know maybe we had a gigantic breakthrough we'd done something really important know we had discovered the secret of life you could say that they was the beginning of the new genetics they had the idea but now they wanted to check that it was right they set about building a tin model as quickly as they could cross-checking their coordinates with the king's data it all fit then we had to tell the people Kings and uh we a bit apprehensive because we didn't want to say well we've beaten you you have to remember that I'd been up before and seen the model that was wrong uh and that gave us a buzz and a high and then you go up there and you see this thing it looked right when you saw it it was so brilliantly elegantly simple I thought oh my God we got scooped because I really thought we were going to come up with something like that ourselves that was terrible you know poor Morris I I said that the double helix was a uh somewhat similar to a a young baby standing there all alive and saying I I don't care uh what you say or what you think um I know I am right rosin would have been appalled to learn that they had taken and quite so much uh detail of her current work and put it into their model how again whether we behave you know right or wrong or where we good or bad guys depends on your set of values and the facts you have the extent to which rosn Franklin was badly treated is still debated to this day she's an enigmatic character who kept her distance from the other people in this story she spent her time working alone in her lab people have wondered how close she came to finding the structure of DNA the only way to know is to visit this archive in Cambridge where her notebooks are kept her notes suggest that she nearly got there in one of her final entries she's thinking in terms of a two-chain or double helix but that's as far as she got she died 5 years later in 1958 without ever being told the extent to which Watson and Crick had used her data and when the Nobel prizes were awarded for the discovery they went to Watson and Crick and moris Wilkins she didn't get one because Nobel prizes can't be awarded postumus people who knew her say that what she cared about most was that her work moved science forward it was one of the few things she had in common with moris Wilkins without their work Watson and Crick could not have built this model and the model was just the beginning over the next two decades scientists delved into the molecular world of DNA and discovered how it actually controls Life The Genius who did more than anyone to unravel its Mysteries was Francis Crick today he's at the Suk Institute in California in one interview that has never before been broadcast Crick did talk about what for him came after the double healing it involves Thinking Beyond what he calls the narrow limits of normal human experience now when you want to understand the world you have to go you have to go beyond those narrow limits both in up and down both in space and time and then you find that there's a uniformity and extraordinary things happening which you had no idea of just looking at the world and it's this is the fascination of science really I think to uncover so much which is not apparent just in everyday day life today we have a way to see the molecular world this is what DNA looks like when you put the very latest scientific data into a computer simulator it's a long way from Tinker toy models what is apparent is that everything in the molecular world is more strange and sophisticated than anyone had thought biological systems are the result of evolution and they produce very complicated things now the reason that DNA look looks so beautiful and simple is it goes right back to near the origins of life where things had to be simple but if you actually look at the actual process of DNA replication it isn't at all the way that it we used to describe all sorts of funny things happen you have to have proteins which will unwind the Helix and Nick it and then join it together again you get an enormously barup complicated apparatus which what might say molecular gadgetry which actually does the job this is the incredible way DNA copies itself but DNA is much more than a self-replicating molecule it is the essence of life carrying from generation to generation the information needed to make all living things written in the DNA language of a C's G's and T's Francis Crick wanted to crack this genetic code to understand the complete process of life to achieve this would involve deconstructing the gadgets of the molecular world he started by working backwards what's sometimes called reverse engineering it happens in the in the commercial world when one firm produces a gadget and another firm buys it and tries to take it to pieces and find how it works that's called reverse engineering but in our case it's reverse engineering what you might call a foreign culture as a result of that process today it's possible to see how DNA makes living things how DNA's code is turned into flesh and blood and for scientists life is no longer a mystery the blue molecule racing down the DNA unzips the double helix and copies one of the two [Music] strands this copy is then released for the next stage of the process the yellow copy feeds into another machine which deciphers the code and orders up the right components one unit at a time from the surrounding chemical soup [Music] the product of this machine is protein this could be a thousandth of an eyebrow the same process could make a tiger's claw or part of the wings of a dove it's the same for all life what is made is all down to the DNA the specific order of the chemical code and today these machines can read that DNA code how a person is made is being revealed how our brains are built is being explained in the G's A's T's and C's they're beginning to read differences in our characters and [Music] personality um the genetics of of human nature is slowly unfolding even our story can be seen in this way the fate of our characters determined by their individual Natures I thought the problem would last me my lifetime I had no idea it would be solved within 20 years you see I was I mean it was embarrassing almost it got to the stage where instead of this problem lasting from one's life one had to look around for another problem now Francis cck is trying to find out how the brain works he's always only been interested in making new discoveries Jim Watson runs Cold Spring Harbor laboratories on Long Island in New York he employs 800 people and is still at The Cutting Edge of DNA science he had a house built on the grounds and erected an enormous sculpture of the double helix he travels the world giving lectures and arguing for the benefits of genetic engineering our people say well we're playing God and you know I have a straightforward answer if we don't play God who will [Applause] [Music] you and Morris Wilkins couldn't be more different having worked on the atomic bomb he chose to study DNA because he thought it wouldn't be controversial today as the newspapers talk of creating designer babies and the birth of human clones he lectures at Kings College London about the social responsibility of [Music] science he hopes the human race will use this knowledge wisely [Music] la [Applause] [Music]