DNA Scientist Francis Crick Dies at 88

He was a very good scientist.

RIP

He was indeed.

I adored "The Double Helix" - talk about science with warts and all! A great insight.

They were bastards in lots of ways, but clever bastards - and honest ones.

Of the two Watson was, and still is, more of a problem. Crick never cared much for the limelight. Incidently it was his wife, who is a graphic artist, who came up with the double helix symbol that is so ubiquitous.

A great scientist and, as Acquiunk points out, more "normal" than Watson.

Crick was at Gonville & Caius College, Cambridge at the time he came up with the double helix - I know this because I was there for my university days and saw the stained glass of the double helix in the window of the hall where we had dinner.

KP

There was also a "dark lady" involved in that discovery. She did not get the credit, however. I'll check it out and be back later

Just so we don't forget her:

http://www.time.com/time/archive/preview/from_covers/0,10987,1101030217-421031,00.html

Letty

Her name was Rosalind Franklin

Dark Lady of DNA

Unfortunately she did not receive the same level of credit (Nobel Prize) because she died of cancer (perhaps due to the X-ray doses she received in her studies of X-ray crystallography, which led to the idea that DNA was a helical shape). Nobel Prizes are never awarded posthumously, so her name is not so clearly associated with the discovery.

KP

Rosalind Franklin. She died before the Nobel Prize was conferred, and it is never given posthumously.

Hey, how come I come in second?

I can't support this, but my son told me that Crick and Watson wined and dined her and she told about all her research which they stole. Grrrrrr.

The usual version (or at least the version I was told) is that a colleague of Franklin showed Watson an X-ray spec she had generated in her crystallography studies of the most common form of DNA, which Watson correctly interpreted as revealing a helical structure. There wasn't much to this inference, I don't think -- it just had to be put together which other stuff that was also known about it. The colleague had no business showing them the data without Franklin's knowledge, as I understand it, but I don't know that the underhandedness went a whole lot further than that.

Watson and Crick did no research of their own -- they just synthesized the work of other researchers into a viable model that happened to be accurate.

The crucial individual was Maurice Wilkins, director of the
Medical Research Council Biophysics Research Unit at King's college, London where rosalind Franklin worked as the x-ray crystallography researcher. Wilkins show Watson one of Franklins's x-ray photographs of DNA that Watson recognized as displaying a double helix structure.

For a short account of the controversy see the following link:

http://www.ba-education.demon.co.uk/for/science/dna.html

His two books on the scientific search for the soul "Astonishing Hypothesis" are mind expanding and extremely well written. Every scientist gets input from all sorts of people although I agree Franklin deserves more credit than she has.

people fail to note that Wilkins was a co sharer of the same Nobel Prize as Watson and Crick. If Franklin would have lived the committee would have probably split the Nobel prize for Chemistry between Wilkins and Franklin that year.(1962) iT is slightly more interesting to me that the Nobel prize for medicine , a few years earlier , went to Rthur Kornberg , who discovered the DNA polymerase reactions that link and unlink the bonds within dNA. That led to many of the major discoveries of enzymatic reactions that ultimately made DNA such a fundamental research tool in genetics, forensics, evolution, and diagnoses. Kornberg already in the late 50s, had available to him the "helical structure" models of Franklin, Wilkins, Watson, Crick , PAuling and even LAwrence Bragg.

Franklin knew that DNA had a double helix structure before Watson and Crick, but unlike them she would not publish before she had confirming experimental data to support her hypothesis. The Watson and Crick model was built on other peoples research, they had no experimental data of their own. Franklin drafted a report detailing the structure of DNA the day before Watson and Crick submitted their paper to Nature. It was never published.

That's the breaks in the scientific world.

Did I already tell you that I had lunch and have been twice for some drinks in the Eagle pub in Cambridge, where Francis Crick announced the "discovery of life" (and he certainly worked on that theory a couple of days over some pints :wink: ).

I didn't tell that, did I :wink:

Nice pub, the Eagle! Fond memories.

KP

Nice pub - and then you remember?