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Figure. “We've got this model.” Antony Barrington Brown, erstwhile student of chemistry at Cambridge University, was working as a campus photographer and a stringer for the national press in May 1953 when a friend asked him to take a picture for a story he hoped to sell to the Times. Apparently an important discovery had been made at Cavendish Laboratory. Barrington Brown set off on his bicycle, towing his tripod and lights to the research quarters of Francis Crick (right), a 36-year-old Englishman, and James Watson, a 24-year-old American who had been working with Crick since 1951. Barrington Brown recalls: “I was affably greeted by a couple of chaps loungeing at a desk by the window, drinking coffee. ‘What’s this all about?' I asked. With an airy wave of the hand one of them, Crick I think, said ‘we’ve got this model' indicating an array of retort stands holding thin brass rods and balls. ... [I]t meant absolutely nothing to me ... . I set up my lights and camera and said ‘you’d better stand by it and look portentous' which they lamentably failed to do.” The Times never used the story or the photos, although Vogue took Watson's picture for a feature a year later. Watson and Crick's letter proposing “A Structure for Deoxyribose Nucleic Acid” was published in Nature on April 25, 1953. They flipped a coin to decide whose name would appear first. The same issue contained papers by Maurice Wilkins, who shared the Nobel Prize with Watson and Crick in 1962, and by Rosalind Franklin, whose crystallographic images of DNA, without her knowledge, paved the way to Watson's realization that the molecule was double-stranded. Franklin died four years before the Prize was awarded. Limited-edition prints of Barrington Brown's photograph and an anniversary poster are available from Science Photo Library Ltd. at www.sciencephotogallery.com — CMAJ Photo by: Antony Barrington Brown / Science Photo Library Ltd.