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As a biologist, every time I read a story about Watson or Crick I am compelled to include Rosalind Franklin and Maurice Wilkins names in the conversation (grant
by TheBiv 12y ago
As a biologist, every time I read a story about Watson or Crick I am compelled to include Rosalind Franklin and Maurice Wilkins names in the conversation (granted the HN audience may not need an introduction to their influence).
This article seems to cast doubt on how important they were in the discovery of the structure of DNA and into inheritable capability, however it is widely known amongst scientists how large of a role they played in Watson and Crick's discovery:
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosalind_Franklin http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosalind_Franklin
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maurice_Wilkins http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maurice_Wilkins
- jjoonathan 12y agoThese days they teach it in school like Franklin did all the work while Watson & Crick were allowed to barge in and steal the credit due primarily to male privilege, which IMO goes too far (it ignores Crick's mathematical contribution, Franklin's unfortunate timing, and the ownership structure of lab projects). The real shame is that we insist on shoehorning a fundamentally collaborative endeavor into a winner-take-all social construct.
- phj 12y agoThe version I learned was that Franklin did all the experimental work, while Crick did the Fourier transforms in his head to interpret Franklin's results. Not sure about Watson's contribution, though.
- jjoonathan 12y agoSounds like your teacher/prof was more level-headed than mine. Was Crick's contribution to the mathematical theory explained or was it sort of implied that he just happened to have the right training? The way I see it, both the diffraction theorists and the crystallization experimentalists deserve credit. Had things happened differently the experimentalists would have gotten all the credit and that would have been just as wrong.
- dnautics 12y agoWatson and crick also together figured out how the known structures of the nucleobases could assemble to become a helix, beyond realizing that Franklin's diffractions implied a double helix (which has a different signature than a single helix, Pauling's incorrect theory)
- kendallpark 12y ago> As a biologist, every time I read a story about Watson or Crick I am compelled to include Rosalind Franklin and Maurice Wilkins names in the conversation (granted the HN audience may not need an introduction to their influence). +1 I was about to do the same.