Summary (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_Story_(TV_film))

The film tells the story of the rivalries of the two teams of scientists attempting to discover the structure of DNA. Francis Crick and James D. Watson at Cambridge University and Maurice Wilkins and Rosalind Franklin at King's College London.

The film manages to convey the loneliness and competitiveness of scientific research but also educates the viewer as to how the structure of DNA was discovered. In particular, it explores the tension between the patient, dedicated laboratory work of Franklin and the sometimes uninformed intuitive leaps of Watson and Crick, all played against a background of institutional turf wars, personality conflicts and sexism. In the film Watson jokes, plugging the path of intuition: "Blessed are they who believed before there was any evidence." The film also shows why Watson and Crick made their discovery, overtaking their competitors in part by reasoning from genetic function to predict chemical structure, thus helping to establish the then still-nascent field of molecular biology.

Assignment: As you watch, please make note of the progression of biochemical structural references  - we will encounter many of these in this unit.  Also make note of the quotes that speak to the different "ways of knowing  - TOK moment - that the various characters bring to their work.

Part 1 (9:32)

Part 3 (9:31)

Part 5 (9:48)

Part 7 (9:26)

Part 9 (15:02)

Part 2 (9:03)

Part 4 (9:13)

Part 6 (9:16)

Part 8 (9:59)

Part 10 (15:05)