Happy Birthday DNA

April 25th, 1953 was the date that Doctors James D. Watson and Francis Crick published their landmark paper on the chemistry and structure of DNA. Wikipedia has a nice writeup:

Molecular structure of Nucleic Acids
The Molecular structure of Nucleic Acids: A Structure for Deoxyribose Nucleic Acid was an article published by James D. Watson and Francis Crick in the scientific journal Nature in its 171th volume on page 737-738 (dated April 25, 1953). It was the first publication which described the discovery of the double helix structure of DNA. This discovery had a major impact on genetics in particular and biology in general.

Impact
This article is often termed a "pearl" of science because it is short and contains the answer to a fundamental mystery about living organisms. This mystery involved the question concerning how it was possible that genetic instructions were held inside organisms and how they were passed from generation to generation.

The article had extra impact because it surprised many biologists who did not suspect that this answer would be as easy to obtain as it was. The structure itself explains why the discovery was easy; the structure is simple and consequently, how the structure produces its function is easy to understand. That Watson and Crick were able to solve this mystery as quickly as they did is an example of prepared investigators being in the right place at the right time and working tirelessly to find the answer. The article is also symbolic of a transition between two ages of what might be called the "classical age" of biology and a second "age" of molecular biology.

Some consequences for humanity due to the dominance of molecular biology arise out of the revolution in biology that can be traced back to Watson and Crick�s 1953 article: pre-natal screening for disease genes, identification of the remains of victims of the September 11, 2001 attacks by DNA testing, genetically engineered foods, the rational design of treatments for diseases like AIDS, releasing wrongly-convicted people from death row by DNA testing of physical evidence.

Lots more double-goodness at the Wikipedia article...