Unravelling DNA's structure: a landmark achievement whose authors were not fairly credited
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Tuesday, April 25, 2023
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This knowledge of DNA allowed for a deeper understanding of how DNA stores information and how it is replicated.
Key Points:
- This knowledge of DNA allowed for a deeper understanding of how DNA stores information and how it is replicated.
- For most of the past 70 years the names Watson and Crick have been synonymous with DNA.
- And the three papers were the result of direct input from seven authors: Rosalind Franklin, Raymond Gosling, Maurice Wilkins, Alec Stokes, Herbert Wilson, James Watson and Francis Crick.
Nevertheless she persisted
- In Watson’s 1968 book The Double Helix he frequently disparages Franklin, making negative comments about her appearance, her feminist principles and her emotions.
- It was a photograph generated by shining x-rays through a crystal of DNA, using a technique called x-ray crystallography.
- The image is known as Photo 51, and it contained critical information on the physical dimensions of DNA.
Things could have been different
- One based in King College London, which included Wilkins and Franklin.
- The article describes an exchange of information, including Franklin “checking the Cavendish model against her own x-rays’ data”.
Unlocking the role of DNA
- Without an understanding of DNA’s role in biology Watson and Crick would not have been at all interested in DNA.
- She produced the first x-ray images of DNA.
- Bell’s work also gave her an inkling of DNA’s critical role in biology.
- They used bacteriophages, viruses that infect bacteria, to show that DNA, not proteins, carried genetic information.
Taking the credit
- The male authors of the 1953 DNA paper enjoyed long careers in academia.
- But Chase only had a brief spell as a researcher before losing her job, for reasons that are unclear.
- Franklin’s achievements were cut short by her death from ovarian cancer in 1958 at the age of 37.
- And Elizabeth Fulhame introduced to science the concept of catalysis, 40 years before its “discovery” by Jons Jakob Berzelius in 1835.