Word: franklin
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...arrogance, hadn't bothered to take notes. "If a subject interested me," he would write, "I could usually recollect what I needed. This time, however, we were in trouble, because I did not know enough of the crystallographic jargon." A key point was the amount of water present in Franklin's DNA samples. Watson remembered the number incorrectly...
...weeks later, Crick and Watson were pretty sure they had it. DNA was a triple helix. They invited Wilkins to take a look at their model, and to their surprise, Franklin came along too. It didn't take long for everyone to realize that Watson's memory had betrayed him. The amount of water a DNA molecule had to contain was a whopping 10 times the quantity he had assumed. The structure Crick and Watson had so confidently come up with was impossible...
Their mistake had two immediate effects. First, Bragg, already fed up with Crick's impertinence, forbade the pair to work actively on DNA. Second, Franklin, previously suspicious of Crick and even more so of Watson, was convinced that the latter, at least, was a blithering idiot. Chagrined, Watson and Crick turned over their model-making kits to the King's group and urged Wilkins and Franklin to use them. Watson and Crick may have been ambitious for themselves, but they were passionate about knowing the structure of DNA. If they couldn't make the discovery, they would have to acquiesce...
...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...
Watson also knew he had to warn Wilkins and Franklin about Pauling's near miss. On Friday, Jan. 30, he went to London. Wilkins wasn't in his lab, so Watson dropped in on Franklin. 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...