Word: dna
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...studying physics and during World War II worked on radar and magnetic mines. But like Watson, he switched fields after reading Erwin Schrodinger's What Is Life? After their triumph in 1953, Crick went on to study the larger issue of how the millions of base pairs along DNA's twisted strands convey the message of the genes...
Together with Brenner and others, Crick provided an initial solution: DNA's sequence of four bases, taken three at a time, direct the formation of 20 amino acids; then, guided by DNA's single-chain cousins, messenger and transfer RNA (whose existence Crick predicted), these molecules link up to form more complex proteins. In the process, Crick asserted, genetic information always flows one way, from DNA to RNA to protein, an idea he called molecular biology's "central dogma...
...Franklin returned from Paris to study nucleic acids at King's College in London, where she produced the clearest X-ray images of crystallized DNA that anyone had ever obtained. She discovered and photographed the hydrated B form of DNA, and she 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...
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...
...need to be defended. Prickly she may have been, even brusque and difficult, but she was never troubled by bitterness over what might have been. Who was Rosalind Franklin? The snippy, standoffish, supporting player? The brilliant, wronged woman? Or somebody else entirely? There are deeper mysteries in life than DNA, and some of them may never be solved. --By Lev Grossman