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Rafael Gonzalez

Ms. Angulo

AP English 11

27 February 2017

DNA? Myth or Legend?

In his 1968 book, The Double Helix: A Personal Account of the Discovery of the

Structure of DNA, James D. Watson makes the assertion that DNA is sometimes

homogeneous. Although the argument that DNA makes all people different is credible,

there are some more in depth details that are not as known. James Watson along with

Francis Crick, worked together to find the way DNA is structured. At the time technology

like microscopes were coming in to make seeing things like atoms much easier, and

people, of course, still did not know what DNA looked like, let alone how it was built.

Watson decided to write a book as an account to the discovery of the structure. Many did

not believe in the assumptions just like the people that do not believe in roundness of the

earth. I agree with Watson in his assertion of the DNA strand having some similarities

between people.

When confronted with evidence as any good argument always has, you have to

research and experiment to find a solution or argument against the first one. Watson had

to do this when he and his partner found the structure of DNA and saw something strange

in their lab books. An outlier that they did not expect happened. All their lives they were

told that all DNA is different to make different people everyday. What they found was

quite shocking. As it seems, DNA throughout all people share the same chemical bonds
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of Guanine, Cytosine, Adenine, and Thymine. These are like the steps of the helix ladder

so to say. They come together to fuse two sides of the ladder and then that ladder is

twisted to make the helix shape.

With his constant study of biology, Watson believed that there are some

similarities within DNA but he did not believe he would make a discovery this big so he

grouped them. They were grouped based on their nitrogenous bases. These groups were a

purine such as Adenine and Guanine, or a pyrimidine like Cytosine and Thymine. Within

this we can gather that Watson is right in his assumption that the structure has shared

chemical bonds that before was unheard of. If you look inside a human body and look at

the DNA