Modern Humans (Humans: An Evolutionary History)

It was the completion of a scientific venture as momentous as the race to split the atom or the mission to land on the Moon. The adventure had begun in an English laboratory, where a team of researchers studied life at the level of individual cells. James Watson, Francis Crick, Maurice Wilkins, and Rosalind Franklin made scientific history in 1953 when they discovered the structure of DNA, the material inside each cell that is the blueprint for every species of plant and animal.That discovery launched a revolution in genetics, the scien- tific exploration of how DNA carries information from one generation to the next and gives life its form.