Relics, replicas and commemorations

Several replicas of Watson and Crick's demonstration model of DNA built at the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge in 1953 exist, but where is the original? Once the object of intense discussion but soon superseded by more refined models built at King's College London, it slowly fell to pieces and was eventually disassembled. Twenty years after it was first constructed, some of its pieces resurfaced at Bristol. By that time, the value attached to the original incarnation of the double helix had changed substantially, and the Science Museum in London commissioned a replica of the model, with some of the original parts built into it. The model was hailed as 'the nearest there is to the original'. It has since served as prototype for further replicas. Meanwhile the spidery model of DNA has become the ultimate icon of 20th-century life sciences, and more pieces supposedly belonging to the original continue to appear at auction.