Re: [MLUG - DISCUSSION] The other side of the double helix

[Jonathan King <EMAIL:PROTECTED>]

On Wed, 11 Aug 2004 19:07:09 -0500 (CDT), Mike Miller
<EMAIL:PROTECTED> wrote:
> On Wed, 11 Aug 2004, Stephen Montgomery-Smith wrote:
> 
> >> http://www.sdsc.edu/ScienceWomen/franklin.html
> >
> > Years ago I read the "Double Helix" written I think by Watson.  In the
> > discourse he described his thorny relationship with Rosalind.  At the
> > end of the book he admitted that they had treated her unfairly.
> 
> Yes, that book was written by Watson.  Many people who knew Franklin were
> upset by Watson's silly descriptions of Franklin.  I liked the bit at the
> end where Watson admitted that he had treated her badly, but I have heard
> that Watson added that part after he was criticized by his peers.

And, on the other hand, Crick basically didn't speak to Watson for
some time after the book came out.  In the NYT obituary for Crick,
they make a point that the really true situation was perhaps a bit
different from most of the published or widely disseminated versions. 
For starters, the data on this kind of thing was *supposed* to be
shared around, although that doesn't explain the lack of authorship
credit for Franklin on the final report.

[snip]

> If she had outlived Crick or Watson or Wilkins, she would have one the
> Nobel prize, but they give a single Nobel prize to three or fewer
> scientists.  The Nobel committee had to wait for someone to die before
> handing out the prize for the structure of DNA.  Franklin died first.

I think that's a bit revisionist.  I don't see any way Franklin would
get recognized for this in the early 60s, given the climate.  Heck,
McClintock didn't get anything for transposons until well after that,
and there were many other cases where women got shafted for the Nobel.
 If they had really wanted to honor only 3 people, they could have
left out Wilkins.  Or, if they had been in a different mood, they
could have awarded one prize to Franklin and other pioneers in X-ray
crystallography, and a second to Watson and Crick for the discovery of
the structure of DNA and the stuff they did right after this (e.g.,
Crick's correct "comma-less code" hypothesis, etc.)
 
> The thing I'll say in Watson's defense is this:  He knew that DNA was
> *extremely* important and he pursued it relentlessly.  Most of the other
> scientists working on the structure of DNA didn't have that big picture
> and didn't care enough about solving the puzzle.

I think it's more reasonable to say that they fell for an argument
from ignorance.  Once it was clear that DNA was a polymer of only 4
chemical bases, people wondered out loud how it could actually be the
genetic material.  (Yeah, that sounds stupid to us in the digital age,
but Shannon was just barely on the map in his own field, much less in
biology.)

> Franklin seems to have
> cared fairly little about DNA, but she did much of the key work on it
> nonetheless.  Watson is still working in molecular genetics today (he was
> only 25 years old in 1953 when his famous paper on the structure of DNA
> was published; he had finished his PhD at age 22).

On the flip side, Crick was 35 when he started his PhD work on this
stuff.  How those two met up and progressed as rapidly as they did is
really pretty amazing.  Even if Pauling had managed to get to the
structure first, I imagine W&C would have done a lot of the pioneering
work.

jking

ps--I finally found a truly way-cool and brilliant book for the
general reader on developmental biology.  Ethan Bier's "The Coiled
Spring: how life begins" seems to be one of the top 10 general science
books I have ever read.
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