ABSTRACT
Molecular biology as a field was born in the late 1930s from the marriage of physics and chemistry, in an effort to explain nature, and gained momentum during the postwar atmosphere of the 1940s. With the advent of nuclear physics, radioactivity, quantum mechanics, and X-ray crystallography, it became easier to study the actions and mechanisms of biological macromolecules, and after the structure of DNA was discovered in 1953 (Watson and Crick 1953) (also see Chapter 1 for a brief history), efforts in molecular biology accelerated even more.
