The history of DNA is a saga full of brilliant scientific discoveries, incredible accidents, blunders. It begins with the discovery of a nuclein in the late 1860s and ends with the publication of James Watson's book "Double Helix" in 1968. In those 100 years, the Nobel Prize, antibiotics, X-ray crystallography, radar and the atomic bomb emerged, not to mention two devastating world wars - and each of those events influenced the discovery of DNA. James Watson and Francis Crick solved the riddle of the double helix, but Gareth Williams reveals that their contribution was the last piece of a giant puzzle that many history-forgotten scientists collected over several decades. This book is about one of the greatest triumphs of modern science and people who understood the composition and structure of this mysterious molecule.