9th Solvay Conference on Chemistry, 1953
When the Conference on Chemistry gathers in April 1953 to discuss the theme of proteins, several English and US chemists try to explain the structure of DNA. They all believe that it is a macromolecule with a quasi-periodic structure but crystallizing the DNA to be able to submit it to X-rays that would reveal its structure is a matter of experimental brilliance. Lacking any clear imagery, several hypotheses compete with one another: Linus Pauling and his colleague Robert Corey imagine a winding spiral with three strands that is published in February 1953. In the meantime, a far neater image than those used by the US group to elaborate a spatial structure was produced in London by Rosalind Franklin and Raymond Gosling, an image that Maurice Wilkins passed on to Francis Crick and James Watson but refused to share with Linus Pauling. And with good reason, since it is the English group which, on the basis of this picture, established the correct structure that would earn them a Nobel Prize. It is in the course of the Conference on Chemistry that Linus Pauling publicly recognizes that the structure that he proposed is not the right one and that he embraces the double helix.
