In 1953 James Watson persuaded his sister to type his and Francis Crick's paper for the journal Nature by promising her that she would be participating in what would become the most famous event in biology since the publication of Darwin's Origin of the Species. He kept his promise. The paper, reporting the authors' work in Cambridge, showed how genetic material in the form of DNA can be copied from cell to cell and generation to generation. Arguably, the double helix was the most important step in understanding the world of molecular genetics, which is having a significant effect on medical and agricultural research today.
British scientists remain at the forefront of human genetic research. The Sanger Centre at Cambridge, the world's largest genome sequencing centre, is sequencing one-third of the human genome, the largest contribution by any single institute anywhere in the world.
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