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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.
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.
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".
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.
You are correct. Rosalind Franklin was the one who actually made and interpreted the x-ray diffraction images of DNA. Then her work was shown to Watson and Crick, behind her back, who published their model of the double helix and got famous.
Rosalind Franklin [wikipedia.org] was the one who actually made and interpreted the x-ray diffraction images of DNA. Then her work was shown to Watson and Crick, behind her back, who published their model of the double helix and got famous.
This is basically correct, but I think that both the contribution of the diffraction images, and the degree to which Watson and Crick behaved unethically, tends to be somewhat overstated. Franklin actually published her results in the same issue of Nature as the double helix model. The main reason why this affair is remembered is because Watson published a rather uncomplimentary account of Franklin in his book The Double Helix (short summary: he thought she was a good scientist, but a raging feminist bitch). Franklin was at that point long since dead and could not defend herself. Watson also has a long history of pissing people off.
If nothing else, the real reason Franklin isn't more famous isn't that Watson screwed her: she died of ovarian cancer at age 37, four years before Watson and Crick won the Nobel prize (along with Maurice Wilkins, who really didn't deserve it).
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."
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.
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Perhaps you're thinking of Jerry Donohue, the post-doc physical chemist?