Word: dna
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Fatefully, such amity did not prevail at a laboratory over at King's College, London, where a woman named Rosalind Franklin was creating the world's best X-ray diffraction pictures of DNA. Maurice Wilkins, a colleague who was also working on DNA, disliked the precociously feminist Franklin, and the feeling was mutual. By Watson's account, this estrangement led Wilkins to show Watson one of Franklin's best pictures yet, which hadn't been published. "The instant I saw the picture my mouth fell open," Watson recalled. The sneak preview "gave several of the vital helical parameters...
...Watson who fit the final piece into place. He was in the lab, pondering cardboard replicas of the four bases that, we now know, constitute DNA's alphabet: adenine, thymine, guanine and cytosine, or A, T, G and C. He realized that "an adenine-thymine pair held together by two hydrogen bonds was identical in shape to a guanine-cytosine pair." These pairs of bases could thus serve as the rungs on the twisting ladder of DNA...
...long chain. It was Crick who had fastened onto a chemist friend's theoretical hunch of a natural attraction between A and T, C and G. He had then championed the complementarity scenario--sometimes against Watson's resistance--as a possible explanation of "Chargaff's rules," the fact that DNA contains like amounts of adenine and thymine and of guanine and cytosine. But it was Watson who had first learned of these rules...
Writing up their findings for the journal Nature, the famously brash Watson and Crick donned a British reserve. They capped a dry account of DNA's structure with one of the most famous understatements in the history of science: "It has not escaped our notice that the specific pairing we have postulated immediately suggests a possible copying mechanism for the genetic material." They faced the question of byline: Watson and Crick, or Crick and Watson? They flipped a coin...
...double helix--both the book and the molecule--did nothing to slow this century's erosion of innocence. Watson's account, depicting researchers as competitive and spiteful--as human--helped de-deify scientists and bring cynicism to science writing. And DNA, once unveiled, left little room for the ethereal, vitalistic accounts of life that so many people had found comforting. Indeed, Crick, a confirmed agnostic, rather liked deflating vitalism--a mission he pursued with zeal, spearheading decades of work on how exactly DNA builds things before he moved on to do brain research at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies...