Crick, Watson and Wilkins collectively received the Nobel Prize for Physiology and Medicine for 1962. Their prize speeches are reproduced in the present volume: respectively ‘On the Genetic Code’, ‘The Involvement of RNA in the Synthesis of Proteins’, and ‘The Molecular Configuration of Nucleic Acids’. Other winners this year were Max Perutz for work on crystalline proteins, and John Steinbeck for literature.