ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Beyond the Double Helix: Paul Doty, Polymer Chemistry, and the Structure of DNA

• In Event: Second Nature: Synthetic Materials and the (Re)making of Biological Knowledge in the Twentieth Century

English Abstract

The discovery of the structure of DNA, often regarded as the single most iconic event in twentieth-century biology, is frequently conflated with the model proposed by James Watson and Francis Crick in 1953. Yet, the discovery of DNA’s structure was not so much an event as a process and that process neither began nor ended with the double helix. Another crucial step toward understanding the structural basis of inheritance was Harvard chemist Paul Doty’s 1961 demonstration of strand separation and nucleic acid hybridization, which not only confirmed the Watson-Crick model but also laid the technical foundation of modern molecular biology. Here I seek to explain how Doty, who began his career as a physical chemist utterly uninterested in biology, arrived at one of the most consequential — if largely forgotten — discoveries in the history of the modern life sciences. My examination of Doty’s entry into DNA research in the mid-1940s reveals a set of previously unrecognized ties between early nucleic acid research and the nascent field of polymer chemistry. During the 1940s, the polymer concept united chemists from disparate subfields around a common framework, engendering new forms of collaboration and exchange. I argue that this convergence led Doty to apply techniques he had developed for characterizing synthetic polymers — including plastics — to biological polymers such as DNA.

Author

• Amalia Rose Sweet, Harvard University