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Why did James Watson and Francis Crick choose to name the molecule after the Greek word for ‘strange’?
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They named it after the Greek word for “strange” because they thought the structure was so strange. DNA is a double helix that is made up of four different nucleotides, each of which is named after a chemical element: adenine, cytosine, guanine, and thymine. The structure of DNA is quite complex, and it is one of the reasons that it is so useful for storing information.