Word: dna
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Watson turned grudgingly to work on the structure of the tobacco mosaic virus, and Crick went back to hemoglobin. But no mere lab director could keep them from talking about dna between themselves. And while their blunder the first time around had been dispiriting, it didn't discourage them. After all, they had no reputations to be tarnished. And if they had come to the wrong conclusions based on incomplete information and a dumb mistake, that was just an incentive to get better information and be more careful next time...
...King's College group, meanwhile, pushed ahead with its DNA research. Franklin kept working to perfect her X-ray images. In May 1952 she took one that would prove crucially important--though until the day she died, she would never realize it. By increasing the humidity in her lab apparatus, she and graduate student Raymond Gosling discovered that DNA could assume two forms. When sufficiently moist, the molecule would stretch and get thinner, and the pictures that resulted were much sharper than anything anyone had ever seen. They called the wetter version the B form of DNA...
...course DNA was an acid. Pauling, the world's greatest chemist, had made a mistake in basic chemistry--an unimaginable blooper. Watson and Crick retired to the Eagle to drink a toast to Pauling's failure. They were more nervous than ever, though. The paper was scheduled to be published in March; once it was out, someone would notice the error, and Pauling would work that much harder to vindicate himself. They had at most six weeks to figure out DNA...
...What happened next--from Watson's point of view, at least--was recorded in great detail in The Double Helix. The passage shows how formidable Franklin could be but also demonstrates Watson's adolescent delight in needling her. He tried to engage Franklin in debate about the idea that DNA was helical, which she still insisted was unsupported by evidence. "Rosy by then was hardly able to control her temper," he writes, "and her voice rose as she told me that the stupidity of my remarks would be obvious if I would stop blubbering and look...
...merely imagine the emotional hell he had faced during the past two years," writes Watson, "he could treat me almost as a fellow collaborator rather than as a distant acquaintance." In the course of that conversation, Wilkins trotted out one of Franklin's images of the B form of DNA. Labeled Photograph 51, it was her best--and, writes Watson, "the instant I saw the picture my mouth fell open and my pulse began to race. The pattern was unbelievably simpler than those obtained previously. Moreover, the black cross of reflections which dominated the picture could arise only from...