Excerpt:
Harold has given me a relatively simple task of essentially repeating my little book, The Double Helix, and so I prepared some slides from the book, the pictures in it, and I will race through the story and then make a few comments at the end, seeing the discovery after 40 years.
The origin of the work goes back to my days as a student at the University of Chicago where I believe it was the fall of 1945, I read a little book called What Is Life? by the German physicist Erwin Schrodinger, who had received the Nobel Prize for his work in wave mechanics. Schrodinger said the essence of life was essentially heredity, and the key problem was, "What is the gene?" And in particular, "How can you copy a gene?" The gene must carry very specific instructions, and there must be some marvelous trick by which you can exactly copy the structure of a gene. So that inspired me, the following term at the University of Chicago, to go to the lectures by a very famous geneticist named Sewall Wright, who gave a course entitled Physiological Genetics. From that I came away with the feeling there were three problems