The O. Henry Prize Stories

It was his crystalline A-form X-ray photograph that had told us there was a highly regular DNA structure out there to find. If Linus Pauling's ill-conceived structure had not gotten Francis and me back into the DNA game, Maurice, keen to resume work on DNA the moment Rosalind Franklin moved over to Birkbeck College, might by himself have been the first to see the double helix. He was temporarily in the States when the prize story broke, and held his press conference next to a big DNA model at the Sloan-Kettering Institute. The long-standing rule that a Nobel Prize can be shared by at most three individuals would have created an awkward if not insolv-able dilemma had Rosalind Franklin still been alive. But having been tragically diagnosed with ovarian cancer less than four years after the double helix was found, she'd died in the spring of 1958. Celebrating my big news with Wally Gilbert (left) and Matt Mesekon (right) After class ended, I soon found myself with a champagne glass in hand and talking to reporters from the Associated Press, United Press International, the Boston Globe, and Boston Traveler ...»