Word: labs
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...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...
...implied that she was incompetent in interpreting X-ray pictures. If only she would learn some theory, she would understand how her supposed antihelical features arose from the minor distortions needed to pack regular helices into a crystalline lattice." The explosion occurred. "Suddenly, Rosy came from behind the lab bench that separated us and began moving toward me. Fearing that in her hot anger she might strike me, I grabbed up the Pauling manuscript and hastily retreated toward the open door. My escape was blocked by Maurice [Wilkins], who, searching for me, had just then stuck his head through." Franklin...
...Franklin and Wilkins have a formal falling out. The lab's director assigns Wilkins to work with the B form of DNA and Franklin to concentrate on the A form...
...Francis Crick in a modest mood." James Watson's mischievous opening line of The Double Helix raised many eyebrows at the time, but even Crick wouldn't quarrel with it now. Still brash and outspoken at 86, even without the booming laugh that once echoed through Cambridge's Cavendish lab, Crick has no reason for modesty. In the years since their discovery of the double helix, Crick, unlike Watson, has continued to do significant research, mostly by pondering big--and often controversial--theoretical questions rather than by toiling in the lab. Says his longtime colleague and fellow Nobel laureate Sydney...