El secreto de la vida

Until the 1950s, not even the brightest minds in science knew how genes passed the essential information for life from an organism to its offspring. When on February 28, 1953, scientists James Watson and Francis Crick burst into a Cambridge pub to proclaim the discovery of the double helix structure of deoxyribonucleic acid -DNA-, nothing was ever the same in the history of science and of humanity. Watson, Crick and Maurice Wilkins won the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1962, while the bestseller The Double Helix, Watson's memoir of the discovery, established an official account riddled with half-truths, insults and prejudices. The perfect villain of that book was the chemist Rosalind Franklin, who had been fundamental in the work that led to the discovery and who, however, was relegated. The secret of life is the story of the struggle between complex and ambitious personalities called to revolutionize biology, at a time -in the middle of the 20th century- when scientists were considered something like gods, in an academic system devoted to progress, but also elitist, misogynistic and anti-Semitic.