ABSTRACT
In the famous photograph of James Watson, Francis Crick, and the double helix, the two future Nobel laureates pose around the object of their desire (on the history of this photograph see de Chadarevian 2003). The photograph was taken in 1953, the year of their discovery of the DNA double helix structure; it went on public display only 15 years later in Watson's best-selling book, The Double Helix (Watson 1968). Today this picture still stands for the successful representation of the DNA molecule in the construction of its model as the key event of their discovery. Together with Watson's book, this visualization contributed in its own way to the process by which Watson and Crick's version of events entered public consciousness and by which other research paths were cast into the shade, notably the crucial preliminary work of their fellow researchers. In the scientific practices of the young molecular biology of the 1950s and 1960s, model making became the ultimate research tool. Molecular models and their images circulated between laboratories, were deployed in lectures and exhibitions, became commercially produced and distributed. Simultaneously, they determined the public image of molecular biology/genetics in the media then and now. 2
