In what year did Watson and Crick first meet?

Watson and Crick first met in 1951 at the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge, England. James Watson had recently arrived from the United States, while Francis Crick was a British physicist-turned-biologist working on the structure of proteins and other biological molecules.

Their partnership developed quickly because both were fascinated by the possibility that DNA carried hereditary information in a decipherable molecular form. Watson was only 23, whereas Crick was 35, but they shared an interest in building physical models that could explain experimental evidence. Their early discussions soon focused on DNA’s possible structure.

The date is sometimes confused with 1953, the year their famous double-helix paper appeared in Nature, or 1952, the year Rosalind Franklin and Raymond Gosling produced the crucial X-ray diffraction image known as Photo 51. Those later events were important, but the Watson–Crick collaboration began in 1951. Their model also drew on work by Franklin, Gosling, Maurice Wilkins, Erwin Chargaff, and others.