Word: franklin
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...finest old manuscripts are no longer the exclusive domain of scholars and wealthy collectors. Now, thanks to Octavo Corp. of Palo Alto, Calif., anyone with a computer and CD-ROM drive can enjoy priceless works by Galileo, Shakespeare, Ben Franklin and other greats exactly as they appear in the originals--complete with watermarks, worn pages and wormholes. Says Richard Kuhta, librarian of the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington: "You can do everything but smell the book." What's more, readers can instantly search these digital copies, unlike the originals, to find a word or phrase. Co-founded by Adobe Systems...
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...
...Franklin died of cancer in 1958, at 37. In 1962 the Nobel Prize, which isn't given posthumously, went to Watson, Crick and Wilkins. In Crick's view, if Franklin had lived, "it would have been impossible to give the prize to Maurice and not to her" because "she did the key experimental work." And her role didn't end there. Her critique of an early Watson and Crick theory had sent them back to the drawing board, and her notebooks show her working toward the solution until they found it; she had narrowed the structure down to some sort...
...Horace Freeland Judson observed in The Eighth Day of Creation, this sort of synergy is, above all, what Rosalind Franklin lacked. Working in a largely male field in an age when women weren't allowed in the faculty coffee room, she had no one to bond with--no supportive critic whose knowledge matched her gaps, whose gaps her knowledge matched...
...British chemist Rosalind Franklin's X-ray photographs of DNA show that the molecule has a helical structure...