Slashdot Mirror
DNA, Fifty Years To the Day
An anonymous reader writes "Today being the fiftieth anniversary (April 2, 1953) of the Watson-Crick double-helical, DNA discovery [to quote, 'We wish to put forward a radically different structure...'], there is an interesting tally of completed gene sequences here, and ones still being worked, including the Ames strain of the anthrax bacteria. It also appears that the only lifeforms not using DNA for code storage are a few viruses like the common cold."
<QUOTE>It's interesting to note that since their discovery of DNA's double-helical structure, neither Watson nor Crick have discovered or published anything significant since then.</QUOTE>
RUBBISH. Francis Crick proposed the Central Dogma of Molecular Biology, which is at least as important as his proposed model of DNA. In a nutshell, the central dogma states that the information encoded in the linear sequence of nucleotides in genomic DNA is transcribed into the linear sequence of nucleotides in RNA, and that the linear sequence of nucleotides in RNA is translated into the linear sequence of amino acids in proteins. At the time Crick postulated this, the link between RNA and the other two was very poorly understood. This was a remarkable contribution to the field. Crick did a whole lot more than just model building.
It irritates me when people make claims like this. Though Franklin was responsible for producing the image which Watson used, there is no evidence that she had realized the helical nature of DNA. She deserves credit for producing the vital image, but not for discovering that DNA is helical. Nothing she wrote before or after suggests otherwise. Furthermore, it is in fact very likely that, had she not died in 1958, she would have been awarded the Nobel prize along with Watson and Crick.
Even if you are unwilling to recognize this fact, I hope you will not unkowingly sully the name of Crick. Watson was responsible for accquiring the unreleased image of the B form of DNA. Whether or not Watson obtained this image without Franklin's permission, Cricks was unaware. If you must demonize anyone, it should be Watson. Everything he has said in the ensuing years has shown just how pompous and deceitful he is.
But no matter how detestable Watson may be, he and Cricks were the first ones to correctly determine that DNA was helical in shape. There is no evidence to suggest otherwise.
Pax Digitalia
Pauling did publish a proposed structure for DNA a few weeks before W&C's paper (in fact, it was his publication that drove them to have another shot at model building) - but Pauling's model was attrocious. Like W&C's first attempt, it was a triple helix with the phosphates on the inside, not on the outside (a fact which, incidentally, was demonstrated by Franklin a year before).
But, W&C or Pauling would have certainly figured it out much faster if they had access to her information.
I don't know what you're talking about here - W&C did have access to her data, without her knowledge or permission - and it was the only way they could propose a model. To put it simply, her oft-reprinted photo was the supreme evidence that the B-form of DNA was a helix.
And Rosalind Franklin (and Ray Gosling, her PhD student) were very, very close to solving the structure, not only of the B-form of DNA but also of the dehydrated A-form of the molecule. They had recognised that both forms were a double helix and had come close to recognising the significance of the the Chargraff ratios of base-pairs at the time of W&C's publication. Their only "failing" was that they wanted to make sure that any model they proposed was in fact the correct one by having X-ray crystallographic data to support it. W&C never cared about any of that, and never bothered to check whether their model was accurate. That's why they "figured it out faster"!