The world of genetics changed, even in the Soviet bloc, when James Watson, an American, and Francis Crick and Maurice Wilkins, two Englishmen, were awarded the Nobel Prize in 1962. Their discovery of the structure of DNA—the molecule that makes up every gene on earth, arranged in the shape of the now-famous double helix—allowed them, and later their colleagues, to deduce the mechanism by which DNA reproduced itself in generation after generation after generation. The process of DNA reproduction explained, in turn, how genes reproduce and how they maintain themselves endlessly, in precise and
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