Life Story (film)
Life Story (known as The Race for the Double Helix in the United States) is a 1987 television historical drama which depicts the progress toward, and the competition for, the discovery of the structure of DNA in the early 1950s.The film dramatises 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.It explores the tension between the patient, dedicated laboratory work of Franklin and the sometimes uninformed intuitive leaps of Watson and Crick, against a background of institutional turf wars, personality conflicts, and sexism.It also shows how Watson and Crick made their discovery, overtaking their competitors in part by reasoning from genetic function to predict chemical structure, helping to establish the field of molecular biology.The film script was written by William Nicholson, based on James Watson's 1968 memoir The Double Helix: A Personal Account of the Discovery of the Structure of DNA.