Rosalind Franklin - My Favourite Scientist

Rosalind Franklin is a lesser-known hero in the famous story of DNA's discovery.

More favourite scientists at http://www.favscientist.com/

Category:

Science & Technology

Tags:

• Rosalind
• Franklin
• DNA
• double
• helix

[commodoman1]

I KNOW THIS IS OFF TOPIC But Rosalind is HOT and crick is a prick!:P

[1000wrongdecisions]

@puncheex Thanks for the link. It leads me to one of the best video I've seen on YT. Amazing amazing story.

[puncheex]

... Even the closest person to her, her lab assistant, doesn't know. They gave the award to Watson, Crick and Wilkins; there was murmuring about that, but she was already dead, and the Nobel is only awarded to live persons.

There is an extremely interesting video about it just released: see watch?v=gj9DS4EKvRY It interviews Watson, Crick, Wilkins, Peter Pauling (Linus' son), and Raymond Gosling, her lab assistant.

[puncheex]

... (they'd found out from another scientist that the Cs and Gs, and the As and Ts, were always equal in counts) and she had her x-rays. One day Watson went over to see her, and ran into Wilkins, who showed him her pic of the structure which she gave him in confidence. That was enough for Watson; he knew what the X in the pic meant; within a month they had it. It's not certain whether Franklin even knew about what happened before her death, or how she felt about it. ...

[puncheex]

Actually, she worked at Kings College, and was titularly under Maurice Wilkins, a very shy but ambitious scientist who had worked on the Manhattan project. She ran her own shop, her and her assistant. Watson and Crick worked across town at Cambridge. They were trying to piece together the DNA structure from a forces viewpoint, and she was trying to do so using x-ray crystallography. They had one piece of the puzzle ...

[jeebersjumpincryst]

@puncheex hi - thanks for the interesting info! :)

[MuonRay]

Franklin did'nt know she was even looking at the DNA double helix structure, she did'nt get the credit because she was very cloistered and did'nt interact with Watson and Crick very much, despite being in the same departments and working in the same field. If she had been open about her findings, instead of putting them in a drawer in her office desk, then she would have got the credit too- she did'nt want to work with Watson or Crick. this often happens in science, its tough but it happens.

[puncheex]

... she would have to work at Mt Wilson observatory, which was male-only at the time. In 1972 she refused to accept the Annie J. Cannon Award of the American Astronomical Society because it was awarded to women only: "It is high time that discrimination in favor of, as well as against, women in professional life be removed". Happily, 12 years later the Society awarded her its highest honor, regardless of gender, the Henry Norris Russell Lectureship. At 91 she is professor emeritus at UCSD.

[puncheex]

@cmxcmx: I wouldn't say that they were less than honorable. What they were was typically male chauvinist for that time and in the British culture.

A very similar case was Margaret Burbidge nee Peachey, an astronomer who, along with her husband Geoffrey, Fred Hoyle and William Fowler developed the B2FH theory, the theory that lead to Sagan's conclusion that "we are all stardust". She earned her doctorate in 1943 but was turned down for a Carnegie Fellowship because...

[BIGKINGCRUZ]

u suck