Skip to main content

The timeline can be navigated with the “Scroll Left” and “Scroll Right” buttons or by dragging the pointer to a date on the timeline waveform (located at the bottom of the screen on the desktop version and on the left of the screen on mobile). To filter by a particular topic and see a smaller section of the data, make a selection on the dropdown “Filters” menu or click “Search” to do a keyword search. Hover over the abbreviated filter tags in the blue boxes to see the complete name of the filter, or click a filter to display all the data with this tag. If you want to take a deeper dive into a specific topic by viewing a narrative essay page and a curated timeline, click on “Stories.”

Read More

Francis Crick, James D. Watson, and Rosalind Franklin discover the molecular structure of DNA.

1953

The Story of The Patenting of Life
GEN
HISS

Crick and Watson draw heavily on the work of another DNA researcher, Rosalind Franklin, who is not included in the announcement and does not receive a Nobel Prize alongside the male researchers.

Immediately after the structure is published, several researchers begin to patent nucleotide derivatives, some of which naturally occur. This is an early precursor to genetic patenting.

Crick and Watson present: "a double helix that contained two long, helical strands wound together" (Hernandez, 2020), and this begins the onset of scientific researchers attempting to produce synthetic DNA.