The book has been hailed for its highly personal view of scientific work, though has been criticised as caring only about the glory of priority and the author is claimed to be willing to appropriate data from others surreptitiously in order to obtain it.

It presents a selection of both positive and negative reviews of the book, by such figures as Philip Morrison, Richard Lewontin, Alex Comfort, Jacob Bronowski, and more in-depth analyses by Peter Medawar, Robert K. Merton, and Andre Lwoff.

Erwin Chargaff declined permission to reprint his unsympathetic review from the March 29, 1968, issue of Science, but letters in response from Max Perutz, Maurice Wilkins, and Watson are printed.

An annotated and illustrated version of the book, edited by Alex Gann and Jan Witkowski, was published in November 2012 by Simon & Schuster in association with Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press.

The edition was favorably reviewed in The New York Times by Nicholas Wade who commented, "anyone seeking to understand modern biology and genomics could do much worse than start with the discovery of the structure of DNA, on which almost everything else is based.

The book does not include the four press cuttings from the News Chronicle, Varsity and The New York Times (2) of May and June 1953 regarding the discovery of the structure of DNA, and Crick's letter of 13th April 1967 is incomplete.

Jeff Goldblum starred as Watson, with Tim Pigott-Smith as Francis Crick, Juliet Stevenson as Rosalind Franklin, and Alan Howard as Maurice Wilkins.