Process

Paper

Hill 1

Process Paper

For this years National History Day competition theme, Exploration,
Encounter, and Exchange, I wanted to research a topic pertinent to my interests. I
decided to research James Watson and Francis Crick and their discovery of the
double helix, as I am currently interested in the field of medicine as a career. The
discovery of the double helix led to monumental advances in biology, genetics, and
medicine. I decided this topic would perfectly fit the theme of this years National
History Day theme.
I began my research with the plethora of sources provided by the National
Institutes of Health. This government agency has multitudes of resources including
definitions of DNA and its related functions, the history of genetic research, and
primary sources from the scientists that made the discovery of the double helix a
reality. I also looked for books online and at my local library district, where I found
several informative items that aided me in my research. From there, I looked
through YouTube to find documentaries and informative videos that would help me
understand DNA and gain knowledge regarding the history of its study. The last
stage in my research involved searching for specific primary source documents and
articles on the Internet.
I decided a website would be most effective in presenting the story of the
double helix. This topic involved many pictures of famous figures alongside many
diagrams of the functions of DNA. The functions of DNA are very complex and
difficult to picture, so I decided that the project I needed to create needed to be able

Process Paper

Hill 2

to include the amount of pictures I needed for the audience to understand the
processes I was describing. By this factor alone, I decided a website would be the
easiest and most effective format to display the story of the discovery of the double
helix. I utilized a large amount of pictures in my website, alongside several other
formats of media.
The discovery of the double helix perfectly fits this years National History
Day theme: Exploration, Encounter, and Exchange. The reason this topic stuck out
to me when I was presented this years theme was how Watson and Crick gained
their knowledge to reveal the double helix. The argument that Rosalind Franklin
deserves just as much credit as Watson and Crick in discovering the double helix has
become a recent topic of debate, for she performed groundbreaking experiments in
x-ray crystallography which ultimately led Watson and Crick to their famous
discovery. I realized that this very argument involved exchanging knowledge
among several scientists, and, upon further research, I realized that Watson and
Cricks discovery involved the exchange of knowledge with many other scientists,
including Franklin, Maurice Wilkins, and Linus Pauling. While conducting my
research, it became apparent that the exploration of the functions of DNA led to the
need to discover its structure, and the discovery of the structure of DNA allowed
scientists to encounter new fields of biological study and applications for genetic
science.

Word Count: 495