The incredible discovery of DNA announced in a Cambridge pub

The Eagle is the second oldest pub in Cambridge. Its history is closely intertwined with that of the prestigious university. The building is in fact owned by Corpus Christi College, and it is only a few hundred meters from King’s College. The ideal place to drink a beer after a seminar and settle the fumes of the discussion, or for a lunch break. The ceiling is marked by graffiti left by Allied forces during the war using the flame of candles and other tools. In the winter of 1953, two young researchers from the nearby Cavendish Laboratory regularly went to the Eagle for lunch and often also for breakfast. They are into biology, but neither originally trained as a biologist. Francis Crick, English, began his career as a physicist, but the destruction of his laboratory by a German bomb during the war helped direct him elsewhere. And then Francis read a little book that struck him and many other physicists who in the following years would move towards biology: “What is Life?” (1944, Italian ed. “Che cos’è la vita”, Adelphi), a cycle of lectures held by the physicist and Nobel prize winner Erwin Schrödinger at Trinity College, Dublin. “How can events in space and time that occur within the confines of living organisms be explained by chemistry and physics?” the author wondered. And he replied that “the obvious incapacity of physics and chemistry today to give an explanation of such events is not at all a good reason to doubt that the two sciences will ever succeed”. The physicist also introduced the idea of ​​an “aperiodic crystal” carrying genetic information.