Crick, F.H.C.: "The Discovery of the Double Helix Was a Matter of Selecting the Right Problem and Sticking to It," Chronicle of Higher Education, October 5, 1988. Francis Crick’s own recollections of the hectic days when he and James Watson deduced that the structure of DNA is a double helix.

Greider, C., and E. Blackburn: "Telomeres, Telomerase, and Cancer," Scientific American, February 1996, pages 92–97. Telomerase enzymes act on chromosome ends, shortening them with each cell division.

Hall, S. S.: "James Watson and the Search for Biology’s ‘Holy Grail’," Smithsonian February 1990, pages 41-49. This article outlines the effort to provide a complete sequence of base-pairs for the human genome.

Judson, H.F.: The Eighth Day of Creation, Simon and Schuster, New York, 1979. The definitive historical account of the experimental unraveling of the mechanisms of heredity, based on personal interviews with the participants. This book provides a feel of how science is really conducted.

Marx, J.: "How DNA Replication Originates," Science, December 8, 1995, pages 1585–88. Researchers are beginning to understand the cellular machinery that ensures that DNA copies itself once—and only once—during each cell division cycle.

Watson, J.D.: The Double Helix, Athenaeum Publishing Company, New York, 1968. A lively, often irreverent account of what it was like to discover the structure of DNA, recounted by someone in a position to know.

Watson, J.D., and F.H.C. Crick: "A Structure for Deoxyribose Nucleic Acid," Nature, 1953, vol. 171, page 737. The original report of the double helical structure of DNA. Only one page long, this paper marks the birth of molecular genetics.