Interviewee: Arthur Kornberg. Arthur Kornberg talks about Watson and Crick's Nature paper.

I read that pair of papers in Nature, I was impressed, it didn't alter my way of life an iota. And in fact there is a rather naive component in that paper, which assumed that once one put the individual A next to a T and successively each of the building blocks, somehow they'd link together spontaneously. And to anyone who'd worked with enzymes this was so naive, and impossible, because you depend in every chemical reaction in nature, even the hydration, adding water to carbon dioxide, on an enzyme to catalyze that reaction thousands of fold faster than it ordinarily would, and to direct it. And so we already knew that enzymes had to exist to catalyze and direct the assembly of a double helix.

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