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."

Comments

Rosalind Franklin

[SUB7IME]

Let's not forget Rosalind Franklin - the woman who actually took the X-ray photographs of the DNA molecule. Without her, Watson and Crick would not have been able to discern the DNA structure!

Re:Rosalind Franklin

[Digitalia]

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.

Re:Rosalind Franklin

[shellbeach]

Well said ... I was going to mention her myself, but you beat me to it! It's worth noting that Rosalind didn't propose a model herself because she wanted to be sure that she had all the empirical evidence first - and that included the fact that DNA formed two different (A and B) conformations depending on the amount of water present - a fact that Watson and Crick never concerned themselves with (actually, there's a third conformation as well, the really kinky (literally) Z-DNA ... but nobody knew about that back then!)

So Watson and Crick did not do any experimental reseach, proposed a model based on Rosalind's unpublished results, never gave her any credit ... and, in the end, there was no conclusive proof that their modal was the correct model (in fact, it was Rosalind who provided that proof and improved on their model in the weeks following W&C's publication). Not to mention the fact that Watson performed an utterly dastardly character assasination on her in his book The Double Helix .... If it wasn't so tragic it'd almost be funny ...

But while we're at it, don't forget that along side Rosalind Franklin was Ray Gosling, a PhD student who did a lot of the work and never got any credit at all. Just like most PhD students, I might add :)

FWIW, the Brenda Maddox's bio of Rosalind Franklin is fantastic reading - probably the best biography of any scientist I have read. It is inspiring, moving and extremely well researched (especially when the author, AFAIK, had no science background before writing the book).

they should..

[Anonymous Coward]

have eliminated the troll-genes back then, before it became too late...

Bake a Cake

[Ken@WearableTech]

In honor of the birthday I'm going to make a a cellular peptide cake with mint frosting ;-)

Re:As always,

[BornInASmallTown]

If you've not read it, The Double Helix is a great book that discusses the discovery from Watson's perspective. He covers his, Franklin's, Crick's, and Linus Paulings's involvement in a very interesting story. It's a short book, and well worth your time.

Watson rips on Franlin pretty hard in the book, but mainly because of personality conflicts. He acknowledges in the end that without her contributions, they wouldn't have achieved the same success.

Remember, they didn't discover DNA!

[ASquare]

...they only described it's structure. The discovery of DNA goes back to at least 1929, possibly earlier (depending on which discovery you're looking for.)

1865 - Gregor Mendel shows that heredity is passed in discreet units

1900 - Three scientists independently verify Mendel's work, and formulate the laws of heredity

1909 - Willhelm Johannsen coins the term gene

1911 - Thomas Hunt Morgan shows that chromosomes contain genes

1929 - Phoebus Levin discovers that genes are made up of nucleotides (i.e., genes are made up of DNA)

1943 - William Astbury obtains first X-ray diffraction pictures of DNA

1951 - Rosalind Franklin's X-ray diffraction images show DNA has two different forms, and that it takes the form of a helix

1953 - Watson and Crick formulate their model

acknowledgements....

[urbazewski]

From the acknowledgements section of their letter to Nature:

We have also been stimulated by a knowledge of the general nature of the unpublished experimental results and ideas of Dr. M. H. F. Wilkins, Dr. R. E. Franklin and their co-workers at King's College, London.

Not included in their acknowledgements section: the fact the "general information" about Dr. R. E. Franklin's work was in fact a very specific look at her crystallography data which was removed from her lab without her knowledge or consent by Dr. M. H. F. Wilkins.

Here's a brief NPR review of a recent biography of Rosalind Franklin and a more extensive review in Scientific American which details the theft of data by Watson/Crick/Wilkins.

ABC's program on Rosalind Franklin

[ivi]

Here's a lot more of the story of her work:

Book Talk on "The Dark Lady of DNA..."
[Broadcast on Saturday 29 March 2003]

Listen via Audio on Demand from:

www.abc.net.au/rn/arts/booktalk/audio/booktalk_290 32003_2856.ram

Brenda Maddox on why the young English biophysicist Rosalind Franklin was never to know how vital her own work was to Francis Crick and James Watson's discovery of 'the secret of life.'

The biographer of D.H. Lawrence, W.B. Yeats and Nora Barnacle, James Joyce's wife, Brenda Maddox talks about her life of Rosalind Franklin at the Cheltenham Festival of Literature.

See also:

"The Dark Lady Of DNA"
Author: Brenda Maddox/Rosalind Franklin
Publisher: Harpercollins

Re:As always,

[urbazewski]

I really enjoyed The Double Helix the first I read it, shortly after high school. The second time I read it, just after grad school, I was appalled. Watson & Crick's (& conspirator Wilkins') deliberate theft of Rosalind Franklin's work violated any reasonable standard of academic or professional conduct, as well as being highly unethical. The fact that Watson went on to trash her in his book only adds insult to tremendous injury.

If you are interested in learning about the abusive mistreatment of women researchers look no further than The Double Helix.

Re:viruses are DNA?

[HarveyBirdman]

Some viruses use RNA.

Influenza, measles, mumps and polio are all RNA based viruses.

DNA viruses include herpes and hepatitis. I think HIV is a DNA type but I don't recall offhand.

Re:Some interesting info...

[Milo Fungus]

<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.

Physics Today Article about Rosalind Franklin

[MacJedi]

There was a pretty good (and free) article about Rosalind Franklin in Physics Today last month that gives a good overview of her, her X-ray photographs, and her much discussed role in the discovery of DNA.

/joeyo

Re:In Other News...

[silhouette]

Like so many other things, the Simpsons have been predicting this for years. And without duplicates, too.

Lionel Hutz: Ladies and gentlemen, I'm going to prove to you not only that Freddy Quimby is guilty, but that he is also innocent of not being guilty. I refer you to my expert witness, Dr. Hibbert.

Hibbert: Well, only one in two million people has what we call the "evil gene". (holds up a card showing DNA) Hitler had it, Walt Disney had it, and Freddy Quimby has it. (chuckles)

Hutz: Thank you, Dr. Hibbert. I rest my case.

Judge: You rest your case?

Hutz: What? Oh no, I thought that was just a figure of speech. Case closed.

"In other news..."

[Overly Critical Guy]

1. Find obvious article to whore in.
2. Skim the summary.
3. Reply and title your post "In other news..."
4. Take premise of article and twist it into something obviously absurd. Make sure it is not clever, original, or funny in any way.
5. Wait for dull, crackhead moderators with itchy mouse fingers to click it up into the various realms of Funny That Is Not.

I will either be modded down, someone will post another "step" to my list that references responses like mine, or some Anonymous Coward will copy my style as they usually do.