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50th Anniversary of DNA's Discovery
nxg125 writes "The New York Times has a section on the 50th anniversary of Watson & Crick's discovery of DNA. Lots of good articles about the discovery, Watson & Crick themselves, and where this information will take us from here."
Well, this's been a long long time. There was that whole revolution in cell physiology in the 70s. Now we're on the computational part.
The human genome is read, but still we need to figure out: given a sequence of letters (out of the four), what protein (3-D structure, function, reactive parts etc) is associated with it? How is it cut into introns and exons? What sequence of letters can act as regulators? (without such answers I find the human genome project pretty useless)
Still, a Nobel well awarded to Watson and Crick, I'd say.
reason defies logic
Rosalind Franklin performed some important work that was ultimately built upon by Crick, Watson and Wilkins. Given more time she'd probably have reached the same conclusions, but the others got there first.
In science, the people who make the final discovery get more credit than the people who did the work that made this discovery possible. Chauvinism has nothing to do with it.
(On the other hand, Watson is one of the less pleasant people that I've had the poor fortune to meet)
Can't you see that everyone is buying station wagons?
nice that DNA was discovered while stareing at Xrays now software does a good job
info: sanger center Cambridge was one of the centers that they helped sequence human DNA
why ? Because of the ability to patent squences of DNA
(that drug companies get rich off) they had to do it before evil companies did like Celera Genomics who used a more inactuate method (shotgun) but evily patented it
welcome trust is a huge Charity that funds research in this area
ptenting DNA is silly these are naturally occuring things (squences) they where not created just discovered its all very silly
Cuba and alot of africa are starting not to recognise these patents as they would like to build the drugs that help AIDS and HIV
its sad that AIDS and HIV has to come along just to show the world that patents are stupid on DNA
anyway
here is lots of software related to DNA
regards
John Jones
The original Watson/Crick paper specifically thanks Dr. R. E. Franklin. What more would you have them do?
Co-authorship on the the paper. A standard practice for someone who gives you the crucial bit of data.
------- Was it just a coincidence I got moderator points the first time I logged on to
On the contrary, if anything there's speculation that the Nobel committee waited for her to die so it was uncontroversial to award the prize to Watson, Crick and Wilkins. (There being a limit of three recipients.)
Basically, however much Franklin was overlooked at the time, overcompensation and political correctness have led to her contributions being overestimated now. She had data, so did a lot of people. She might have worked out the structure on her own; Pauling certainly would have. Fundamentally, Watson and Crick made the breakthrough others didn't and they deserve credit for it.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
"Wrong" grossly understates the complexity of Franklin's interaction with Watson/Crick. She was neither wrong nor right. She was doggedly neutral in assessing the structure of DNA. Franklin was wrapped up in the notion that the structure of DNA could only be discovered through X-Ray diffraction, and not through using the modelling approach that Watson and Crick ascribed to. Was was very, very, correct, however, when she discovered that DNA has two states: "zipped" and "unzipped". That served as a direct catalyst to Watson and Crick's break through. That would have gotten her the Nobel Prize, also, if she had survived long enough (it cannot be awarded posthumously).