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Double-Helix Model of DNA Paper Published 59 Years Ago
pigrabbitbear writes with musings on the anniversary of the groundbreaking paper on DNA structure by Watson and Crick. From the article: "Consider every organism that's ever lived on Earth. From dinosaurs to bacteria, the number is near infinite, and an overwhelming majority have their entire structures and lives dictated according to their DNA. The DNA molecule is life itself, and it's astonishing that we've only known what it looks like for less than a century. But it's true: In one of the most groundbreaking papers ever published, James D. Watson and Francis Crick described the double-helix structure of DNA in Nature, 59 years ago today."
Wait for a year and there is (a bit of) a story.
Rosalind Franklin deserves credit. Shew as not the first to publish, but it was her data that Watson and Crick used and she had come to the same conclusion as they had.
Palm trees and 8
"From dinosaurs to bacteria, the number is near infinite..."
Pet peeve. No number that can be thought of is anywhere 'near' infinite.
I bet everyone though it was an April Fools joke.
Who knows how much longer it would have taken to discover if Crick wasn't tripping balls:
http://www.miqel.com/entheogens/francis_crick_dna_lsd.html
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Consider every organism that's ever lived on Earth. From dinosaurs to bacteria, the number is near infinite, and an overwhelming majority have their entire structures and lives dictated according to their DNA
The number of organisms that ever lived is as close to infinity as the amount of protons in the cosmos. No where near to infinite at all.
She did all the x-ray crystallography that showed the structure. She should also get credit for the discovery of the structure. But because she was considered impersonable (to say the least), history relegates her to a footnote.
Sure his account is one-sided, but I don't think he's the type who would or could conceal vital facts about what Ms. Franklin did or didn't do sixty years ago that could have a bearing on credit for the discovery. Watson confirmed that he attended a talk given by Franklin where she presented an x-ray crystallography photo of DNA that seemed to indicate some sort of helical structure, but he says that Franklin insisted that there was no helix.
The relationship of Crick to Watson seemed similar to that between Shockey and Bardeen/Brattain for the invention of the transistor; the leader and driving force, vs. the one(s) who actually made the discovery.
Many years ago I attended a talk Watson gave about the discovery. When a woman asked the inevitable question in Q&A (everyone laughed nervously), Watson replied, "I think the reason Rosalind didn't make the discovery was because she wanted to do it herself, whereas Francis and I could bounce ideas off each other".
The more I learn about Watson the more I'm inclined to believe he was a dick.
http://www.brown.edu/Courses/BI0020_Miller/dh/guide.html
-- ... is most likely a woman!" Hmm, Watson - check, Einstein - check, where is/was Newton's woman? =)
That cliche seems to be true here too "Behind every successful man
Too soon.
Apparently there was some woman scientist involved in the breakthrough who did not get full credit and acknowledgment.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
59 years ago and slashdot is just now reporting it?
60 is a wonderful number. It is both a unitary perfect number and a Harshad number. It's the smallest number that can be expressed as the sum of two odd primes in 6 ways. It has many nice geometric representations resulting from its highly composite nature.
Of course this is all redundant, because there is no such thing as an uninteresting natural number.
Phage deserves some credit too...i mean Phage are after all the most abundant lifeform on earth.
W&C`s experiments where only possible because of Phage Research.
"near infinite"?
59th anniversary?
Funny thing is that it was the grad student who realised that dried organic material (long and skinny) show the same molecular structure as a wet sample (which was short and fat); Rosalind Franklin ridiculed the grad student for suggesting this, the grad student went down the hall and talked to Watson and Crick who understood the implications of what the grad student was suggesting.
Rosalind Franklin may have been shown something, but she was too busy making fun of her own grad student to ponder the implications.
Near the end of the paper is this wonderful understatement: "It has not escaped our notice that the specific pairing we have postulated immediately suggests a possible copying mechanism for the genetic material."
Yes, it's the pairing of bases between strands, the freedom of ordering bases along each strand, and the implications for representing and copying arbitrary sequences of characters that are truly important.
For some reason the phrase "double helix" is always quoted. "Double" has some significance, but the helical shape is not particularly important. It's a natural result of the uniformity of the chain independently of the attached bases.
It seems that Watson and/or Crick understood what was important, but the biological community seemed to focus on the geometrical structure rather than the information processing capability.
Mike O'Donnell http://people.cs.uchicago.edu/~odonnell/
...fuck
The sequence of bases on a single chain does not appear to be restricted in any way. However, if only specific pairs of bases can be formed, it follows that if the sequence of bases on one chain is given, then the sequence on the other chain is automatically determined. ... It has not escaped our notice that the specific pairing we have postulated immediately suggests a possibly copying mechanism for the genetic material.
Nature, number 4356, April 25, 1953, p. 737.
Mike O'Donnell http://people.cs.uchicago.edu/~odonnell/
From TFA:
The DNA molecule is life itself, and it’s astonishing that we’ve only known what it looks like for less than a century.
Sigh. No, DNA is not "life itself." It requires the copying mechanism and the interpretation mechanism. Even then, there is important life information carried in the immune state, and probably in other mechanisms that we haven't noticed yet.
"What it looks like" isn't really so important. The functional properties, in the complicated environment of a cell, are important. This quote from the Watson/Crick paper catches the important part:
The sequence of bases on a single chain does not appear to be restricted in any way. However, if only specific pairs of bases can be formed, it follows that if the sequence of bases on one chain is given, then the sequence on the other chain is automatically determined. ... It has not escaped our notice that the specific pairing we have postulated immediately suggests a possibly copying mechanism for the genetic material.
Mike O'Donnell http://people.cs.uchicago.edu/~odonnell/
. . . though it leaves out mention of the graduate student that Watson and Crick acquired to help them through the hydrogen bonding, the name of whom escapes me at the moment. (Anyone remember?) I always felt he deserved more credit than he got.
--
Perhaps you're thinking of Jerry Donohue, the post-doc physical chemist?
My guess, the looming potential apocalypse towards the end of 2012 overrides any patience OP may have wanted to exercise in waiting for the big 6-0.
As an aside, if read without pauses or inflection, the subject line gives the same analysis as the body of this post C;
That wasn't peer reviewed at all?
I tend to agree, however imagine where humanity would be if we had to wait for individuals with a 'pristine' sense of ethics and values to advance the course of human development. Personally, I think it is too often that we are told stories of the heroes / founding fathers in history that are bleached clean of the 'imperfections' that make/made them human.
Account -> Discussions -> Disable Sigs
Someone mentions anniversary of important DNA paper.
Geeks rage over inaccuracy of cliche phrase "near infinite" by refusing to recognize commonly accepted non-math definitions for "infinite".
This is why we can't have nice things.
[insert rage comic faces as appropriate]
[quote]"Consider every organism that's ever lived on Earth. From dinosaurs to bacteria, the number is near infinite..."[/quote]
Near infinite? What does that mean exactly? It's either infinite or it's not. You can't be "near" infinite. There's no such thing.
[quote]"... and an overwhelming majority have their entire structures and lives dictated according to their DNA."[/quote]
Ya, because environment and social circles have nothing to do with how their lives are dictated at all, right? And these things have no effect even on the structures of their bodies (i.e. how identical twins never look exactly alike no matter how similar their DNA).
Some of the "science" we hear these days sounds more like biased religion than facts. This sounds like it came right off the Discovery Channel.
Sadly, I bet more people believed the findings 59 years ago than believe them today.
I blame YOU Rick Santorum...as well as all Commodore and Amiga users...
A man named Emanuel Swedenborg (1700's) had a pretty incredible theory on the importance of the spiral (or helix): http://www.shs.psr.edu/studia/index.asp?article_id=194
Numerous references to it's perfection and in the 4th paragraph a direct reference to human anatomy. It's an interesting read.