A DNA illustration on the cover of a 50th anniversary edition of Richard Dawkins's book The Selfish Gene has been drawn the wrong way round, and it is not the first time the same mistake has appeared on the book's covers. The error was highlighted in the Feedback column of New Scientist, the British science magazine, which collects readers' observations about errors and oddities in print.
In the edition in question, the double-helix drawing replaces the letter I in the title. The drawn helix is left-handed, whereas the molecule in living cells is right-handed. The geneticist Simon Fisher was among the first to notice the mistake and shared it on Bluesky. Another reader, Patrick Goymer, found the same flipped helix on the cover of the 40th anniversary edition, suggesting the problem has persisted across more than one printing.
By contrast, the copy from the book's 30th anniversary carries a correctly drawn right-handed helix. The column dates the appearance of the error to some point after 2006. The Feedback column also recalls that a Lego model of DNA shown earlier, in March 2025, had been built as a left-handed helix, which indicates that the mix-up with chirality is a recurring one in popular depictions of the molecule.
The same column carried several other reader contributions, including a truncated Facebook post about the Rotodyne aircraft, an anecdote about an email address based on a person's name, and a story about the abbreviation "Tit" used at Trinity Hall, Cambridge.
Credit. Based on reporting by New Scientist for New Scientist. Is this your work? Write to us.
12
