The history of DNA is a saga full of brilliant scientific discoveries, incredible accidents, and blunders. It begins with the discovery of nuclein in the late 1860s and ends with the publication of James Watson's book The Double Helix in 1968. Those 100 years saw the birth of the Nobel Prize, antibiotics, X-ray crystallography, radar and the atomic bomb, not to mention two devastating world wars—all of which influenced the discovery of DNA. James Watson and Francis Crick solved the mystery of the double helix, but Gareth Williams shows that their contribution was the last piece of a giant puzzle that had been put together for decades by many forgotten scientists. This book is about one of the greatest triumphs of modern science and the people who figured out the composition and structure of this mysterious molecule.