A REVOLUTION AT 50

DNA, the Keeper of Life's Secrets, Starts to Talk - By NICHOLAS WADE

 ifty years ago, on Saturday, Feb. 28, 1953, two young scientists walked into the Eagle, a dingy pub in Cambridge, England, and announced to the lunchtime crowd that they had discovered the secret of life. By divining the chemical structure of DNA, the archive of life, James D. Watson and Francis Crick had seen how the molecule could encode information in the copious quantities necessary to program a living cell. Years later Dr. Crick's wife, Odile, told him she had not believed him, he has written. "You were always coming home and saying things like that, so naturally I thought nothing of it," she said.