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

[Mike Miller <EMAIL:PROTECTED>]

On Thu, 12 Aug 2004, Jonathan King wrote:

> 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.

Here are the papers on DNA published in Nature in 1953:

http://www.nature.com/nature/dna50/archive.html

Note page and volume numbers.  See, W&C published in the same issue as 
Wilkins, Stokes and Wilson, and as Franklin and Gosling.  So there were 
three papers on DNA structure in that issue.  The W&C paper was one page 
long, and it was quite short on technical detail.  Most of the technical 
data were in the papers by Wilkins and by Franklin.


>> If she had outlived Crick or Watson or Wilkins, she would have won 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.

I don't understand.  Women had won Nobel prizes -- Marie Curie won twice.


>> 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.

By the way, that's because his career was interupted by the war.  Watson 
was too young to have that problem.


> 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.

Thanks for the tip!

Mike
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