Viewpoint: Yes, DNA is an electrical conductor, despite inconsistent experimental results and disagreement about how it conducts.

Viewpoint: No, experiments have not conclusively proved that DNA is an electrical conductor; furthermore, there is no universally accepted definition of a wire conductor at the molecular level.

In 1941, long before the historic determination of the double helix structure of DNA by James Watson, Francis Crick, and Rosalind Franklin, Albert Szent-Györgyi, the Nobel laureate biochemist who had discovered Vitamin C, proposed that some biological molecules might exhibit a form of electrical conductivity. This proposal was based on the observation that x-ray damage—the knocking out of an electron by an x ray—at one part of a chromo-some could result in a mutation in a gene located some distance away through motion of the electrons in the molecule. As the structure and...