DNA, Fifty Years To the Day 202
An anonymous reader writes "Today being the fiftieth anniversary (April 2, 1953) of the Watson-Crick double-helical, DNA discovery [to quote, 'We wish to put forward a radically different structure...'], there is an interesting tally of completed gene sequences here, and ones still being worked, including the Ames strain of the anthrax bacteria. It also appears that the only lifeforms not using DNA for code storage are a few viruses like the common cold."
Rosalind Franklin (Score:5, Informative)
Some interesting info... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:As always, (Score:5, Informative)
Watson rips on Franlin pretty hard in the book, but mainly because of personality conflicts. He acknowledges in the end that without her contributions, they wouldn't have achieved the same success.
Remember, they didn't discover DNA! (Score:5, Informative)
1865 - Gregor Mendel shows that heredity is passed in discreet units
1900 - Three scientists independently verify Mendel's work, and formulate the laws of heredity
1909 - Willhelm Johannsen coins the term gene
1911 - Thomas Hunt Morgan shows that chromosomes contain genes
1929 - Phoebus Levin discovers that genes are made up of nucleotides (i.e., genes are made up of DNA)
1943 - William Astbury obtains first X-ray diffraction pictures of DNA
1951 - Rosalind Franklin's X-ray diffraction images show DNA has two different forms, and that it takes the form of a helix
1953 - Watson and Crick formulate their model
ABC's program on Rosalind Franklin (Score:5, Informative)
Here's a lot more of the story of her work:
Book Talk on "The Dark Lady of DNA..."
[Broadcast on Saturday 29 March 2003]
Listen via Audio on Demand from:
www.abc.net.au/rn/arts/booktalk/audio/booktalk_29
Brenda Maddox on why the young English biophysicist Rosalind Franklin was never to know how vital her own work was to Francis Crick and James Watson's discovery of 'the secret of life.'
The biographer of D.H. Lawrence, W.B. Yeats and Nora Barnacle, James Joyce's wife, Brenda Maddox talks about her life of Rosalind Franklin at the Cheltenham Festival of Literature.
See also:
"The Dark Lady Of DNA"
Author: Brenda Maddox/Rosalind Franklin
Publisher: Harpercollins
Re:viruses are DNA? (Score:2, Informative)
Not a very good link (Score:3, Informative)
Here is the *definitive* page for completed genomes:
http://www.ncbi.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?db=Geno
Re:viruses are DNA? (Score:5, Informative)
Influenza, measles, mumps and polio are all RNA based viruses.
DNA viruses include herpes and hepatitis. I think HIV is a DNA type but I don't recall offhand.
genetic algorithms (Score:3, Informative)
Physics Today Article about Rosalind Franklin (Score:5, Informative)
/joeyo
Re:Rosalind Franklin (Score:5, Informative)
So Watson and Crick did not do any experimental reseach, proposed a model based on Rosalind's unpublished results, never gave her any credit ... and, in the end, there was no conclusive proof that their modal was the correct model (in fact, it was Rosalind who provided that proof and improved on their model in the weeks following W&C's publication). Not to mention the fact that Watson performed an utterly dastardly character assasination on her in his book The Double Helix .... If it wasn't so tragic it'd almost be funny ...
But while we're at it, don't forget that along side Rosalind Franklin was Ray Gosling, a PhD student who did a lot of the work and never got any credit at all. Just like most PhD students, I might add :)
FWIW, the Brenda Maddox's bio of Rosalind Franklin is fantastic reading - probably the best biography of any scientist I have read. It is inspiring, moving and extremely well researched (especially when the author, AFAIK, had no science background before writing the book).
Re:Some interesting info... (Score:4, Informative)
Ya know, if I only succeed at creating one entirely new field of knowledge in life, I think I'll look back on my life as a success. Also, as a note, for the last 20 years (or more?) Francis Crick has been working on the rather different field of neurobiology and specifically, the biological origins of human consciousness. In particular, "Crick has published extensively on the neural basis of attention, REM sleep, consciousness and visual awareness" to quote his biography blurb from the Salk Institute. Perhaps it hasn't made headlines, but that doesn't mean he hasn't done other important research.
Most importantly, you don't seem to realize that the way science works is that sometimes you don't really know exactly how important something is when you are working on it. Sometimes, only in retrospect does it become clear if a piece of work is an interesting and novel phenomenon on its own, or more deeply significant, "groundbreaking" research.
Re:I Was Thinking... (Score:2, Informative)
Gene therapy is NOT a standard treatment for anything. It is still experimental and has been shut down completely two or three times in the last decade because of unexpected deaths of patients. The only success of gene therapy to date has been a French study in which 9 children with SCID (Severe Combined Immune Deficiency) were succesfully treated with gene therapy. Even this study has been halted for now because two of the patients have developed leukemia-like symptoms.
Doubtless gene therapy has great promise, but it will be decades before it is a standard treatment.
Re:Rosalind Franklin (Score:1, Informative)
"We didn't know that Rosalind Franklin had in late February turned in the B form because she was leaving King's College. We didn't know her then. I still didn't know about it when I wrote The Double Helix (1968)."
"We're very famous because DNA is very famous. If Rosalind had talked to Francis [Crick] starting in 1951, shared her data with him, she would have solved that structure. And then she would have been the famous one."
Re:Some interesting info... (Score:4, Informative)
This is true in Watson's case, unless you count blatantly sexist, racist, unsupported "research" [mindfully.org] as significant.
Which we don't. Can you believe this guy received a Nobel Prize?
He's done at least one other "publication" like this, too.
Re:Games and books... (Score:3, Informative)