Molecular medicine: promises, promises?

Wilkins, two of the three men who won a Nobel Prize for describing the structure of DNA, have died. Their obituaries revisited the famous 1953 Nature papers,1,2 recalling with relish the classic English understatement ‘It has not escaped our notice that the specific pairing we have postulated immediately suggests a possible copying mechanism for the genetic material’. In reality, Crick, at least, was less subdued, bursting in to the Eagle tavern in Cambridge with James Watson and declaiming to the doubtless bemused clientele ‘we have found the secret of life’.3,4 It was not immediately apparent how knowledge of that secret might affect the practice of medicine. Many years were spent developing the pure science of molecular biology, understanding the principles not only of DN