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Double Helix: 50 Years of DNA
Dr from the Source writes "Despite previous posts, tomorrow (April 25, 2003) is the real 50th anniversary of the publication of the famous paper by J. D. Watson and F. Crick in the Nature journal. Readers can download such paper, along with a few other classic ones from Nature's archive."
Nova had a really great program this week about Rosalind Franklin who did all the crystallography work. Apparently Watson and Crick stole her data and that's what enabled them to come up with the double helix model.
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
For those who didn't catch the Nova episode.
Rosalind Franklin
Rosalind Franklin was a brilliant [female] scientist specializing in x-ray crystalography. It was Rosalind Franklin that identified two forms of DNA, and correlated their diffraction images with the helix shape. Watson and Crick were secretly, and intentionally passed Franklin's in-depth research (some would say "stole"). If Franklin had not died of cancer (probably due to working so much with radiation) at such a young age she would have undoubtedly presented the discovery of the helix nature of DNA (she was far ahead of Watson and Crick, while they were still fscking around with broken models). Watson went on to write The Double Helix, which slandered Franklin, to which even Crick objected. Franklin's paper on DNA was published in the same journal as two other papers (one of which was Watson/Crick's), AFTER the other two, and EDITED without her knowledge to imply that her research merely confirmed rather than provided the foundation for Watson's and Crick's work. After being made so miserable working at the same lab with Watson and Crick, she went on to other things briefly virus research, in which her partner, surprise again, also won a Nobel prize.
Personally I think it is a damned shame. We should be celebrating Rosalind Franklin. Or at the VERY LEAST we should have (and should still) heard her name. Crick and Watson really come off as clueless chauvanistic assholes. Granted, a Nova episode is one data point, but usually their programs are really good, and I'd like to hear other opinions if other people know more about this issue.
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
For the curious, googling for "Rosalind Franklin" is rather informative.
And no, this isn't offtopic.