Word: crick
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Still scattering ideas like so many nucleotides, Crick has just co-authored an article in Nature Neuroscience outlining a broad program for probing consciousness by concentrating on visual perception. Says neuroscientist Nikos Logothetis: "Even in old age, he is one of the most brilliant minds I've ever met." Also one of the most stubborn. Though he was flooded with invitations to join in celebrations of his and Watson's historic discovery, Crick has rejected them all. He's too busy, he grumps, to take part in "circuses." --By Frederic Golden
...Rosalind Franklin? The story of her life is short, tragically so, but it doesn't lack for tellers. Was she difficult Rosy, the Cruella De Vil of The Double Helix, who nearly knocked Watson's block off? Was she Dr. R.E. Franklin, the humble supporting player whom Watson and Crick thanked in the second-to-last sentence of their famous article in Nature? Or was she Franklin the feminist icon, the tormented genius who was cheated out of biochemistry's ultimate prize...
...established, crucially, that DNA's structure depended on an external backbone, with the bases on the inside. But here the stories diverge. According to The Double Helix, Franklin was unable to interpret her images properly and was unwilling to share them with others, to a point where Watson and Crick were forced to go around her to get at her data. According to Maddox, however, Franklin was perfectly capable of interpreting the X-ray images, although she was slow to come around to the helical model of DNA's dryer, more crystalline A form, in which the structure is harder...
...might have--but she didn't. Franklin was the intellectual equal of Watson and Crick, but she lacked the advantage of a sympathetic collaborator, and she simply wasn't the prizewinning type. She was a bloodhound, cautious and implacable, whereas Crick and Watson were greyhounds who lived for the sprint. When they made their triumphant announcement, Franklin was gracious in defeat, accepting her peripheral role with an equanimity that surprised her colleagues. When she encountered Watson and Crick later in life, they met as friends. She probably never knew what a central part her X rays had played in their...
Ironically, Franklin thought of her stint at King's as the low point of her career. By the time the news about DNA broke, she had moved on to a lab at the University of London, where she studied the structure of viruses. There she finally met the Crick to her Watson, the crystallographer Aaron Klug, with whom she did the best work of her career. In 1955 Don Caspar, a young researcher from the California Institute of Technology, visited the lab, and they became close. At 35, Franklin had still never had a fulfilling romantic relationship with...