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DNA Pioneer Francis Crick Passes Away
Neil Halelamien writes "Francis Crick, who discovered the structure of DNA with James Watson, Rosalind Franklin, and Maurice Wilkins, passed away Wednesday in San Diego. His co-discovery of 'the secret of life' made him one of the most influential scientists of all time. In more recent years, he shifted his research efforts from molecular biology to neuroscience, with a particular interest in the question of the neural basis of consciousness."
Don't worry, he'll be back.
In clone form.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Did he use his own, or watson's, DNA under the microscope to make the discovery?
Moo.
...that is, life arriving at earth via DNA sent out from aliens.
More on that theory in Wikipedia. Interesting stuff!
The Army reading list
I'm not a lawyer, but I'm pretty sure the discovery itself could not be patented. They could probably only patent the technology they used to make the discovery and any technology they developed using the discovery. Though I could be completely wrong...
Currently he probably doesn't.
Take a look at this link for some of what the parent is talking about:
n a.html
http://www.ba-education.demon.co.uk/for/science/d
http://nyamenation.org/
It was Crick's. Indeed, Watson didn't even know what Crick was up to in the next room. Suddenly a voice from nowhere rang out: "Watson! Come here! I want you!" After that, there was no looking back. A new era of technology was ushered in.
Didn't you learn this story in elementary school?
GMD
watch this
I would like to take this moment to recommend Francis Crick's The Astonishing Hypothesis to anyone interested in cognitive science. Although the theory of consciousness he espouses is somewhat uninteresting, the book does provide a good overview of the mechanisms by which the human brain functions, and it also describes the field of Cog Sci to some depth.
Whatever it is I'm complaining about, I'm sure the Republicans did it. This is
I rebooted a work machine that was named crick, after I heard. I figure that's like pouring a forty out on the pavement, right?
(also it needed a kernel update)
I know that this article is about the passing of Crick, but it's nice to hear Rosalind Franklin recognized for her significant role in the discovery of the structure of DNA. Certinaly, Watson and Crick did a lot of work ... but they get a lot of credit too, including a nobel prize. Franklin didn't even get credit at the time of discovery because her photographs had been shown to Watson without her knowledge and they (Watson, Crick, and Wilkins) rushed their article to publication.
Later on, more people learned of her contributions, but, sadly, she passed away in 1958 and was therefore ineligible for the 1962 Nobel prize that Watson, Crick, and Wilkonson shared. Without her name on the landmark publication or a Nobel prize, she has been largely forgotten.
To read more about her story, you should check out the book The Dark Lady of DNA.
... turning to the 3-D map, we see an unmistakable con
Watson and Crick didn't use a microscope. Watson and Crick were (iirc) chemists who built models of molecules and tried to create a model that represented a chemical which had the properties of observed dna. When they did their work microscopes capable of looking at molecules up close and personal did not exist. X-ray crystalography was as close as it got. There was some lady in Britain who was working on the DNA problem at the same time, who (in some people's opinion, including mine, no disrespect to the honored dead) did most of the important work. Watson and Crick were close, but they put it all together after meeting with the a researcher in the same university department who shared the contents of her work. All of which makes me wish I could remember her name.
It was on PBS a couple months ago. Good documentary. Crick was reclusive but was interviewed for the occasion; he seemed very genuine and very very smart. Let's all think good thoughts about him or, failing that, drink a beer to his name.
"A witty saying proves nothing." ~Voltaire
"d'Oh!" ~Homer
Sort of. I squirted 70% ethanol on the lab floor.
Crick didn't even know what Watson was doing the night that he made the mock-up. As an interesting note there was a bit of slack in the way the wooden "lego" was made that allowed the correct answer to emerge despite a slight flaw in the idea.
Lastly I think your joke was refering to Craig Venter that used his own DNA at Celera, Right?. I have a lot of respect for Venter despite his slight Megalomaniac tendencies.
Help fight continental drift.
In terms of making the discovery, Rosalind Franklin took pictures of the structure of DNA, Watson and Crick just looked at the pictures and deduced the structure. So I guess you could patent the picture taking process. Toodles.
In nature, there are neither rewards or punishments, there are only consequences.
I always kinda assumed they were using a cheek swab to get the samples. Guess I was wrong.
In either case, its pretty funny that the parent is marked Informative when its either a troll (more likely) or just plain wrong.
It seems to me, and this is totally a gut feeling, that the basic 'units of consciousness' will be in nueral superstructers. I'm actually a supporter of a top down approach -- trying to tear apart things that are apparent to us in our consciousness --Woah! How about getting a definition of consciousness first -- and then trying to find what neurons are responsible for them. We're had more success this way -- finding which parts of the brain light up when we use language, recognize faces, solve math problems, etc.
Furthermore, all the models of nuerons thinking use them as logic gates. That seems to imply to me that some consciousness researchers think the brain is a huge Turing machine -- again, this doesn't seem right to me, because Goedel's Theorem, as I understand, shows there are things a Turing machine can't compute. And if humans can understand Goedel's theorem, we must have something qualitatively different than a Turing machine up there.
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso
They got the Nobel Prize for their discovery. She wasn't included in the prize, even though she was critical in the discovery of the molecule's structure.
Only living people can get the Nobel, and by the time of the prize, Rosie had died of cancer. There's no conspiracy.
Science is a competitive field
The person that publishes first wins
Perhaps Watson and Crick's citation list was rather lite
I don't understand what the big deal is . . . this is science . . . Scientists at the top of their field are egotistical and competitive just like the people in most other careers.
Just because someone else sat in the lab and ran the experiments doesn't mean that conclusions drawn by others based on the same dataset should be credited to the original person that ran the experiments. I think that credit should be given to Watson and Crick for putting together lots of other pieces of knowledge and drawing a conclusion that fits all the data from all the sources in question. That's not stealing, that's not cheating . . . that's just good science.
1. Please don't say 'passed away'. We're not in first grade. he has died
We might say (and I mean this with all due respect, Francis Crick was truly a great man to whom we owe much) with only a little poetic license, that the chemicals which constituted Francis Crick, even as we mourn the end of his life, are -- every adenine, cytosine, guanine, and thymine --, losing that central helical organization that made out of those disparate chemicals, the man Francis Crick.
We will also think of his wife, the artist Odile Speed, and his three children -- each of whom perpetuates one-half of Francis Cricks's genome -- and his four grandchildren -- each of whom perpetuates one quarter of that genome.
(And of course, I gave Francis Crick the traditional Slashdot salute here.)
Opinions on the Twiddler2 hand-held keyboard?
His co-discovery of 'the secret of life' made him one of the most influential scientists of all time. In more recent years, he shifted his research efforts from molecular biology to neuroscience, with a particular interest in the question of the neural basis of consciousness.
In the middle of the 20th century:
Crick: We've done it! We've figured out how life's essence can be boiled down to simple chemical reactions!
God: Aw, crap. Didn't mean for them to figure that out.
Fast forward to the present day:
Crick: That's it! It's so simple, how could I have missed it before! I've figured out how the soul's essence can be boiled down to simple neural combinations!
God: Alright, boy, you've gone far enough. [Flips switch]
Crick: Aaaah! [Hits floor]
There is a really awesome PBS documentary about the beginnings of our knowledge of DNA. I very highly recommend it to anyone with even the slightest of interest.
I can't seem to find it on PBS' page, (perhaps a better title than 'DNA' would have helped) but here is an MSNBC article about the series. It's 5 hour long episodes that covers the race to discover what DNA looked like all, the mapping of the human genome, and some really intersting discussions about the ethics of patenting DNA.
P.S. It's available on eDonkey if you can't find it on PBS' page to buy a copy either. Errr did I just say that?
Crick was amazing, and a true genius, and acknowledged as such by just about anyone in the field of molecular biology. He and Watson basically invented the science of molecular biology, and it was really Crick who envisioned it whole and pushed the field in the direction that it still moves today. He was The Theorist, and one of the few who can claim the title of theoretical biologist with any sort of legitimacy (the other early molecular biology theorist was Jaques Monod) and his numerous papers pushed the field forward in many ways. The central dogma of molecular biology was his. He was one of the few people present who came up with the idea of how DNA sends a messenger (RNA) to ribosomes, which act as dumb machines to translate the message to a functional protein. This seems obvious now, but for a long time it wasn't, and we owe Crick, in no small part, for coming up with this. The man was a true genius and visionary, and he's long been one of my personal heroes. He deserves to be mourned the world over for all he helped build and give to it.
"I may not have morals, but I have standards."
We can accuse Crick and Watson of not being generous in giving Rosalind Franklin the credit she deserved but the credit for the discovery belongs to them alone. Either Franlin did not make the deductions they did or she did but was slow to publish them (which in the world of science is basically the same thing). That said, Franklin would have probably gotten the Nobel prize had she lived long enough. The Nobel prize is never awarded posthumously - and she died four years before the prize was awarded. The real injustice in all of this is that Maurice Wilkins shared Nobel prize for his x-ray crystallography work. Most of the x-ray crystallography work that Crick and Watson had based their deductions on had been done by Rosalind Franklin. Wilkins was neither responsible for the data used to make the deductions nor for the deductions themselves. - HCE
Can you provide any evidence of Crick trying to prevent Franklin from getting due credit? Crick and Franklin remained friends up until her death and were frequent correspondents. Watson and Crick acknowledged Franklin in their original paper, which was published along with papers by Franklin and Wilkins in the same issue of Nature. A few weeks before Watson and Crick put the pieces together, Franklin went around her university hanging up signs declaring the "death of the double helix".
Let's be clear here, there were strong biases against women scientists at the time (and many still exist today). But she did not make the conceptual leap that Watson and Crick made. She never seemed to bear any ill will towards them, and was just happy that the truth was known. People in science get scooped all the time.
Sure, Watson made sexist and derogatory comments about Franklin in "The Double Helix", although one could argue that he made rude comments about nearly everyone involved. If you're angry at anyone, you should be angry at the Nobel committee who chose to wait until after Franklin's death to award the prize (which can't be awarded posthumously).
This has been a particularly rough month for biologists as we also lost the great Ed Lewis, Nobel prize winner and father of the homeobox.
Yes, I think they were right. In the 50 years since the first published postulate of the double helical structure a lot of work has been done (to say the least) that supports it.
I am by training a molecular biologist and I'm pretty sure that the 4 strand helix model does not support the techniques used during genetic engineering in which proteins are used to cut DNA leaving single stranded "sticky" ends that then reattatch to the inserted genes. The structure & function of at least some of these proteins is very well characterised.
Nor does 4 stranded DNA map as readily to tRNA which is single stranded.
Nor does 4 stranded map particularly well to the macro structure of DNA with the extra folding around histone proteins.
Yes DNA does not retain it's classical double helix all of the time. Often it is being repaired or replicated & is unfolded or it is stored in a highly dense packed format but the one to one corrolation between A-T & G-C plus the strong natural binding between the bases means that they probably did get it right.
All my knowledge is out of date by nigh on 20 years but I know enough to be confident that Rosie's results were interpreted correctly by Watson & Crick.
How does a 4 stranded helix give better corrolation to the results? You can't just say these things without giving evidence.
What are you listening to? (http://megamanic.blogetery.com/)
A link to Nature's copy: Watson & Crick 1953 (HTML)
and a PDF
Both contain the original drawing of the structure, as done by Crick's wife Odile Speed.
Simon
henry -- the human evolution news relay
"How do you think we got here and were made."
Without a god.
Yes, pretty much.
We now have structures for a lot of molecules that interact with DNA. DNA that doesn't have Watson and Crick's proposed structure in general won't work with all the proteins that bind to DNA. Sure, you can also suggest that the conformations that these proteins adopt when crystallized are not identical to their in vivo shapes, but it all hangs together pretty consistently.
More recently, NMR has been used to determine protein structures for proteins in solution--this gets you much closer to the in vivo state, and these results generally line up well with the x-ray crystallographic structures.
Electron microscopy of DNA supports the double-helix structure.
NMR experiments also support the double helix under all but some weird circumstances. The Nucleic Acid Database at Rutgers has a very cool collection of NMR and x-ray DNA structures.
In general, DNA exists in a double-helix form. The weird examples above show what happens in a few unusual cases: They represent a vanishingly small proportion of normal DNA--stuff that wouldn't show up in Watson and Crick's work, or configurations that have been deliberately engineered. So yes--skepticism might have been warranted fifty years ago, but we've been past any uncertainty about the predominant form of DNA for decades.
~Idarubicin
So? What if Christians are wrong? What if something like the "soul" doesn't exist without a material brain to support it?
Crick's later research was based on that: try to find in what ways a consciousness can arise from a purely material neural network.
Read "The Astonishing Hypothesis" to see how Crick could truly make sense of what data is available...
A post on iPods elicits 500+ comments.
A post on a pioneer of DNA research: under 200.
Let's hope the next generation of iPod can cure cancer, or we're all fucked.
Goodbye to a truly great man. I met Dr. Crick twice. He was the only scientist I ever met who awed me so completely that I could never call him by his given name. Dr. Crick was involved in essentially every major breakthrough in molecular genetics between about 1955 and the end of the '60s. The structure of DNA, the "Central Dogma," triplet coding, as a very few high points among the accomplishments where his work was central. If you read "The Eighth Day of Creation," the breathtaking history of molecular genetics, you find that for those years it is largely a history of the work of Francis Crick. Following that, he nearly invented the new field of the analysis of the biological correlates fo consciousness. Truly a giant of intellectual achievement, I consider him one of the 5 greatest scientists to have ever lived. He was also a truly generous spirit. Both times I talked with him, he took a genuine interest in my work, discussed in detail my problem, and my experiments, and made serious and thoughtful comments on what I was doing. He didnt have to; I was a graduate student grinding away at what at that time looked like an obscure backwater project. He will be missed. I for one will be hoisting a couple in his honor over the next few days.
Intelligent Design Rocks!!
BOOOO to the Dice Rollers!!!