DNA, 70 years ago the historic discovery announced in a pub

The double helix of DNA turns 70: it was in fact on February 28, 1953 when the British physicist Francis Crick announced in a Cambridge pub that he had discovered, together with the American biologist James Watson, "the secret of life", i.e. the molecule that most of all would revolutionize biology in the years to come, opening up unimaginable scenarios in medicine, from the fight against tumors to even rare genetic diseases, and in every field of science, from paleontology to the search for life in space.

The discovery of the structure of DNA was made in the Cavendish laboratory of the University of Cambridge, thanks to X-ray crystallography images taken by Maurice Wilkins and the 'forgotten' Rosalind Franklin, whose contribution only became known later.

Watson and Crick intuited that DNA was similar to a ladder winding clockwise, with a skeleton of sugars and phosphates and the steps made up of nitrogenous bases, or the 'letters' of the code of life (adenine, thymine, cytosine and guanine ) paired in pairs.

Many surprises followed in the decades after the publication of the discovery in Nature on April 25, 1953, and the recognition of the Nobel prize for medicine, awarded in 1962 to Watson, Crick and Wilkins.

One of the most important was certainly that of reading the genetic code thanks to the great human genome project.

Many challenges still remain open, from understanding the function of the so-called 'junk DNA' to rewriting DNA to correct genetic diseases with increasingly advanced tools of genetic editing techniques such as Crispr.