Memorial for DNA pioneer Crick

25 April 2013 Last updated at 11:43 ET

A memorial to DNA pioneer Francis Crick has been unveiled at his former college at the University of Cambridge.

Attending the ceremony at Gonville and Caius was Dr James Watson, the man who shared the 1962 Nobel Prize with Crick for revealing the structure of DNA.

The engraved stonework, which depicts the double-helix structure of DNA, was unveiled exactly 60 years after the pair's seminal paper was published.

Their discovery has been hailed as one of the greatest in scientific history.

Crick's and Watson's groundbreaking work was published in the journal Nature on 25 April 1953.

Before the structure of DNA was unscrambled no-one had a clear idea how genetic replication - one of the cornerstones of life - worked.

At the unveiling, in front of friends, colleagues and family, Dr Watson paid glowing tribute to his colleague, who died in 2004.

The 85-year-old American, who went on to direct the US arm of the Human Genome Project from 1988 to 1992, said: "Francis was the brightest person I ever interacted with.

"I met the great physicist [Richard] Feynman but I didn't understand what he was doing, so it didn't mean anything. Francis I could talk to.

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Memorial for DNA pioneer Crick