July 29, 2004
Francis Crick Dies
In a former life I was a biochemist. Francis Crick, along with James Watson, discovered the structure of DNA. Outside the Beltway has the news of his passing. If you've never read The Double Helix by James Watson, I highly recommend it. It tells a great scientific detective story.
Posted by David Pinto at
05:26 PM
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Too bad it minimizes the contributions of Rosalind Franklin & Maurice Wilkins, who really deserve half the credit for doing half the work.
Don't forget that Watson & Crick did their dirty work at my beloved Indiana University!
Re: The passing of Francis Crick
I'm still a biologist and patent attorney, and Crick and Watson, and the discovery of DNA, are probably the most important occurrence of the 20th century.
However, to correct the comment above, Watson's memoir THE DOUBLE HELIX, while it minimized Rosalind Franklin & Maurice Wilkins role, still, Franklin would have received the Nobel Prize except that she was dead by the time it was issued in the 1960s. Everyone of the X-Ray crystallographers received a Nobel, including Wilkins, McAndrew etc. Franklin would have received a Nobel also but she tragically died of a life-shortening disease, and the Nobel is not awarded posthumously.
But it remains true that Watson looked at her x-ray crystallography of the structure of the DNA molecule without her knowledge and came to his own conclusions with Crick, without sharing them with Franklin, who had concluded on her own, erroneously, that they proved DNA could not be a double helix. But she was not aware of Chargaff's rules, and with that in hand, Watson and Crick would be able to posit a double helix with A-T and G-C matches.
For baseball, eventually, genetic engineering and closing may have revolutionary impact. We may be able to recreate famous ballplayers from their old DNA. Who knows in 50 years????
After all, in the New Testament, it does say the dead shall rise again.
--AJK