Word: cavendish
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...immediately," writes Crick in his book, What Mad Pursuit, "partly because our interests were astonishingly similar and partly, I suspect, because a certain youthful arrogance, a ruthlessness and an impatience with sloppy thinking came naturally to both of us." (Crick had got in trouble more than once at the Cavendish for pointing out the sloppy thinking of his bosses...
...slightly batty advocate of vitamin C as the antidote to colds and cancer. But at mid-century he was the world's premier physical chemist, the man who had literally written the book on chemical bonds. A few months before Watson arrived, in fact, Pauling embarrassed the Cavendish by winning the race to figure out the structure of keratin, the protein that makes up hair and fingernails. (It was a long, complex corkscrew of atoms known as the alpha-helix.) While he did rely on X-ray crystallographs for hints to what was going on at the molecular level, Pauling...
...problem, he would certainly crack it. "Within a few days of my arrival," writes Watson, "we knew what to do: imitate Linus Pauling and beat him at his own game." To do so, they would need X rays of DNA, but they would have to look outside Cambridge. The Cavendish's crystallographers were interested in proteins; DNA was the province of King's College, London; and while actively competing with Americans was fine, it just wouldn't do to poach--openly, at least--on fellow Brits...
...group and urged Wilkins and Franklin to use them. Watson and Crick may have been ambitious for themselves, but they were passionate about knowing the structure of DNA. If they couldn't make the discovery, they would have to acquiesce to Wilkins' and Franklin's doing it. But the Cavendish botch job had cemented Wilkins' and Franklin's view that building models was not the way to solve the structure of DNA. They never used the kits...
...Cricks had Wilkins and Watson to lunch, and the Cavendish scientists learned several things. First, it was O.K. with Wilkins if they proceeded with their model building (a good thing, since they had already started and had no intention of stopping now). More important, they evidently also learned that the King's group had prepared a report on its DNA studies for the Medical Research Council, which funded the work. It wasn't a confidential document, so Watson and Crick got hold of a copy. In it were some more crucial clues, including the fact that DNA had a particular...