Indeed so, Sailracer. The whole picture is so peculiarly English, isn't it? Here we have the Northampton man Crick and the Chicagoan Watson going down Free School Lane, an alleyway where the Cavendish Laboratory is, some 250 yards to their local pub. Well, where else would you go and what else would you do? Run out into the street yelling 'Eureka!' ? No, far too continental! Run into the rest of the labs or the college buildings next door and tell the other scientists? 'No; we need a pint with our mates. Let's go down the pub and tell them'.The pub is a natural choice;it's where your friends are;where you meet at lunch or after work; there the regulars are market traders from the nearby city market, students, various dons (tutors, professors)from all disciplines, all of whom have lively interest in news and love a bit of gossip to tell them back home after work ( 'Here, guess what Francis Crick said in the pub today...?').
The paper (called a Letter) in Nature just a month later (April 2nd) is so famously understated too:" The structure has unusual features which are of considerable biological interest...It has not escaped our notice that the specific property we have postulated suggests a possible copying mechanism for the genetic material" See, they'd calmed down by then; the last bit is obviously " We have discovered the secret of life" restated in print
Fifty years later the pub's owners and Cambridge City Council got around to putting up a plaque to commemorate this notable conversational gambit .
The Cavendish Laboratory is where man first split the atom ( Cockroft and Walton, 1932). Which pub that was announced in is not recorded. We may doubt whether any place, let alone such a modest unassuming pile of bricks as that, has ever housed two greater discoveries for mankind.
