The Race to the Double Helix — Watson, Crick, Franklin & the Real Story of DNA (EP. 19)

From First Principles · Dec 4, 2025 · 1h 34m · transcript

Hosted by Lester Nare and Krishna Choudhary, this single-story deep dive tells the full story of how humanity uncovered the structure of DNA — and the human tensions that shaped it. From Mendel’s pea-plant mathematics to Rosalind Franklin’s groundbreaking x-ray crystallography, from Cavendish–King’s College rivalries to the famous Photo 51, this episode follows the scientific and ethical arc behind one of the most important discoveries in modern biology.

Summary

Before DNA — Mendel’s inheritance laws, Miescher’s nuclein, Levene’s early models, and why scientists initially believed proteins…