The Race for the Double Helix

From Freepedia

The Race for the Double Helix (also known as Double Helix and Life Story ) is a 1987 TV film dramatisation of the discovery of the structure of DNA in 1953.

The film tells the story of the rivalries of the two teams in the race to the discovery - Francis Crick & James D. Watson at Cambridge University and Maurice Wilkins & Rosalind Franklin at King's College, London

The role of Watson is played by Jeff Goldblum and the role of Franklin is played by Juliet Stevenson. Crick is played by Tim Piggott Smith.

There is some excellent music composed by Peter Howell of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop and some interesting 1950's style molecular models.

The film manages to convey the loneliness and competitiveness of scientific research but also educates the viewer as to how the structure of DNA was discovered. In particular, it explores the tension between patient, dedicated lab work (Franklin) and intuitive leaps fueled by ambition and poached results (Watson and Crick), against a background of institutional turf wars and misogyny. Jokes Watson, plugging the path of intuition: "Blessed are they who believed before there was any evidence." The film also shows why Watson and Crick truly earned their discovery: they overtook their competitors in part by reasoning from genetic function to predict chemical structure, thus helping to establish the then still-nascent field of molecular biology. Nevertheless, Franklin would rightly have shared the Nobel Prize had she not died tragically of cancer before it was awarded. All of this is insightfully examined in the supplementary materials to the Norton Critical Edition of Watson's book The Double Helix (ISBN 0393950751), to which the film makes a fine companion.

Note that in the EDDE Entertainment VHS version (EDO280 1993), a few scenes are inexplicably (and confusingly) cut.