Meaning of âtraitâ in the English Dictionary. See all translations. uk â /treÉªt/ us â /treÉªt/. C2 a particular characteristic that can produce a particular type of behaviour: His sense of humour is one of his better traits. Arrogance is a very unattractive personality/character trait.
It appeared in April 1953 in the scientific paper where James Watson and Francis Crick presented the structure of the DNA-helix, the molecule that carries genetic information from one generation to the other.
It's commonly believed that James Watson and Francis Crick discovered the double helix shape of DNA. But in fact, they based their work on one of their colleagues at King's College in London - Rosalind Franklin, an x-ray diffraction expert whose images of DNA proteins in the early 1950s revealed a helix shape.