Word: cricks
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Using wire models, intuition, a limited knowledge of chemistry and trial-and-error methods, Researchers James Watson and Francis Crick determined that the heredity-transmitting DNA molecule is shaped like a spiral staircase. Al though they had no way of taking a firsthand look at their discovery, they managed to deduce a detailed description of the now famous "double helix" that paved the way for the new science of molecular biology and won them the Nobel Prize. For all the work that has been done in the field since Watson and Crick made their pioneering studies...
...Biophysicist Griffith painstakingly developed himself to bring out maximum detail, show a blurred image that has been magnified 7,300,000 times. Fuzzy as they are, the pictures are clear enough to reveal two DNA strands that are coiled and intertwined in a double helix-just as Watson and Crick predicted nearly 16 years earlier...
PAULING is the book's hero-at-a distance (when he dines with Pauling near the end of the book Watson proudly writes that Pauling prefers his youthful company to Crick's). But Watson's other scientist-characters are viewed from up close, and you can smell them. From the opening line ("I never saw Francis Crick in a modest mood"), Watson is critical of all his scientific colleagues at Cambridge and in London. But he is even more critical of the lesser scientists who were not his colleagues, and who form the bulk of the profession. "A goodly number...
...difficult to believe some of Watson's tales about the quarrelsome coterie of scientists in Great Britain who were after DNA. One woman, Rosalind Franklin, refuses to let Watson and Crick see her X-ray photographs of DNA crystals, the world's best, because she does not believe in the helix theory, and insists on working independently. At one point, Rosy--as her colleagues call her--almost assaults Watson in a one-one-one situation...
...would be folly to think Watson is any more modest than Crick. It is just that he is concerned with the literary value of his narrative. Though he claims in the introduction that he means this book to be the autobiographical recollections of a working scientist, one senses that Watson tries to write about scientific discovery as Melville did about whaling, or Hemingway about bullfighting. Watson wants his autobiographical recollections to be a novel: the novel about science...