SAN DIEGO (AP) - Nobel Prize-winning scientist Francis Crick, who with James Watson discovered the spiral, ``double-helix'' structure of DNA, paving the way for everything from DNA blood tests to genetically engineered tomatoes, has died. He was 88.
Crick died Wednesday at University of California, San Diego, Thornton Hospital, according to Brendolyn Williams, a spokeswoman for the Salk Institute, the research body where Crick worked. Crick had been battling colon cancer.
It was 1953, while working in Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge, England, that the British-born Crick, 36 at the time, and the American-born Watson, just 24, struck upon the famous double-helix structure - like a twisted ladder - of deoxyribonucleic acid, or DNA.
Not until years after the discovery were Crick and Watson's conclusions about the molecular structure of DNA firmly established. At the time, Crick later said, only a small number of people ``even thought it was interesting.
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