Late last night, a 23-year-old scientist named Sam Lukasiewicz made the discovery of the century. Recently, Sam had been researching the background of DNA. “I’m pretty familiar with DNA but I had a feeling that there was more to it than was generally recognized.” Dr. Lukasiewicz had been examining an X-ray crystallography taken by Rosalind Franklin in the 1950’s. He puzzled over it, getting increasingly frustrated. He decided to take a break and relax for a bit, so he popped the movie Spiderman into his DVD player.

As the movie started some spirals and shapes that resemble DNA swirled across the screen. “All of a sudden it struck me,” said Sam. He ran back to the crystallography and then started to laugh hysterically. He had solved the puzzle. DNA is in the shape of a double helix (left). “It sort of resembles a twisted ladder. The rungs of the ladder are made up of four nucleotides, which are; adenine, guanine, cytosine, and thymine,” said Dr. Lukasiewicz.

Further investigation revealed that these nucleotides form polynucleotides, which is the backbone of DNA. They are made up of a phosphate group and sugar deoxyribose. The nucleotides form pairs, which in turn form the double helix. Adenine always pairs with thymine and cytosine always pairs with guanine. Dr. Sam Lukasiewicz will most likely be receiving the Nobel Prize for his amazing discovery.