I understand that it makes it easy for DNA to self-replicate, but why is it important that we know this? Would the world be any worse for wear if we still had no idea?
In: Biology
The shape wasn’t important, But knowing what the shape was allowed us to understand how it worked. Before that it was kind of a mystery.
To put it extremely simply, knowing that DNA has double helox structure enabled us to properly understand the replication process of DNA, also how various chemicals are synthesised in our body and thus resulted in
1. The process of production of Human Insulin, thus making diabetic treatment affordable and saving millions of lives
2. Understanding how cancer works thus being able to save more people than was previously possible
3. The production of new antibiotics for various diseases which in turn saves millions of lives
4. And finally, because DNA was discovered to be double helix, the sequence of DNA was finally able to be decoded, thus being able to do the following
A. Finding what diseases result from what parts of the DNA being affected
B. Every single DNA analysis for crime scenes, paternity tests, identification of dead bodies etc is a result of knowing the sequence beforehand
C. Finding out genetic diseases which can be passed down to children and advising the parents beforehand so they dont doom their future child to a short life of disability
D. Treating certain genetic diseases by gene therapy, very conplex and expensive but works, has saved people with previously hopeless conditions
Source: All my Medicine and Genetics textbooks written by professionals
It’s not the fact that it’s a double helix that’s particularly important, it’s the fact that we know it’s a double helix. The helical structure does come into play in various ways that proteins interact with DNA, but if it happened that that organisation of molecules produced say, a flat tape-like thing instead of a helix, it would still probably be functional, as proteins would just have evolved to interact with flat DNA instead of helical DNA.
I suspect that the helical structure provides a way for the [DNA to fold ](https://www.shmoop.com/study-guides/biology/dna/dna-packaging) into stable shapes than can be packed very efficiently into the spaces that it occupies, without becoming a tangled mess as it folds and unfolds.
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