Questacon delves into DNA

15 May 2003

DNA50 Exhibition produced by British Council - Watson & Crick and beyond

Take one sheep’s egg, remove the cell nucleus and insert another from the adult sheep. Result (sometimes): one clone of the adult. This seemingly simple formula produced ‘Dolly’ the sheep, the world’s first cloned mammal to be born from an adult cell.

Dolly the sheep is just one of the stories highlighted in Questacon’s new exhibition, DNA50, which has arrived direct from London on the start of its Australian tour. The exhibition celebrates 50 years since Nobel Prize winners Watson and Crick proposed the structure for deoxyribonucleic acid (or DNA) in 1953. DNA50 also looks at the contributions made by scientists to our understanding of the science and technology of DNA.

The colourful panels and 15 minute video in DNA50 outline how DNA determines who we are and what we look like; how it helps to solve crimes through advances such as DNA fingerprinting and how we hope it will enable doctors to cure diseases such as cystic fibrosis.

The DNA50 exhibition will be on display at Questacon until 17 June before it goes to Melbourne. The DNA50 exhibition has been produced by British Council and supported by the British High Commission. In Australia, the British Council builds innovative partnerships in Arts, Education and Science.

Come to DNA50 at Questacon and discover why, on 28 February 1953, Francis Crick rushed excitedly into the Eagle Pub in Cambridge and announced to drinkers that: “We have discovered the secret of life!”

The understanding of genes as molecules is sure to go down as the greatest intellectual endeavour of the second half of the twentieth century and its applications will transform lives in the twenty-first.