The discovery of Watson and colleagues opened up some powerful and controversial technologies available today, including genetic engineering, stem cell research and DNA fingerprinting.
The 1953 discovery came only a year after DNA was conclusively identified as the molecule that carries the biochemical information which enables all living things to exist.
Dr Watson and Dr Crick's giant model of a section of DNA, built from laboratory clamps and pieces of metal, is now in the Science Museum in London.
Decoding marathon
The Human Genome Project he helped to launch decades later is an ambitious project to discover the identity and order of every one of the three billion or so key components of the double helix.
At the heart of the molecule are four different nitrogen-containingcompounds called bases. The four bases - adenine (A), guanine (G), thymine (T), and cytosine (C) - spell out the genes. It is the genes that cells use as templates to create the proteins which build and maintain our bodies.
The HGP published its draft reading of all the bases and locations of about 30,000 genes early in 2001, shortly after one of the leading UK scientists on the project, Dr John Sulston, was told he too would receive a knighthood.
Other scientists honoured this New Year include Professor Peter Goddard of the University of Cambridge; he gets an CBE for his services to theoretical physics.
Professor Julian Jones of Heriot-Watt University also gets an OBE for his work on pioneering new types of fibre optics.
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