Life Story is a 1987 TV film dramatisation of the discovery of the structure of DNA in 1953. The film was directed by Mick Jackson for the BBC's Horizon science series and won several prizes including the 1988 BAFTA TV Award as the Best Single Drama. The film tells the story of the rivalries of the two teams of scientists attempting to discover the structure of DNA. Francis Crick and James D. Watson at Cambridge University and Maurice Wilkins and Rosalind Franklin at King's College London. The film manages to convey the loneliness and competitiveness of scientific research but also educates... the viewer as to how the structure of DNA was discovered. In particular, it explores the tension between the patient, dedicated laboratory work of Franklin and the sometimes uninformed intuitive leaps of Watson and Crick, all played against a background of institutional turf wars, personality conflicts and sexism. In the film Watson jokes, plugging the path of intuition: "Blessed are they who believed before there was any evidence.
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