DNA Pioneer Francis Crick Passes Away 247
Neil Halelamien writes "Francis Crick, who discovered the structure of DNA with James Watson, Rosalind Franklin, and Maurice Wilkins, passed away Wednesday in San Diego. His co-discovery of 'the secret of life' made him one of the most influential scientists of all time. In more recent years, he shifted his research efforts from molecular biology to neuroscience, with a particular interest in the question of the neural basis of consciousness."
MOD PARENT UNDERRATED (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Good riddens (Score:4, Insightful)
Science is a competitive field
The person that publishes first wins
Perhaps Watson and Crick's citation list was rather lite
I don't understand what the big deal is . . . this is science . . . Scientists at the top of their field are egotistical and competitive just like the people in most other careers.
Just because someone else sat in the lab and ran the experiments doesn't mean that conclusions drawn by others based on the same dataset should be credited to the original person that ran the experiments. I think that credit should be given to Watson and Crick for putting together lots of other pieces of knowledge and drawing a conclusion that fits all the data from all the sources in question. That's not stealing, that's not cheating . . . that's just good science.
Re:patentable ? (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:patentable ? (Score:4, Insightful)
We might say (and I mean this with all due respect, Francis Crick was truly a great man to whom we owe much) with only a little poetic license, that the chemicals which constituted Francis Crick, even as we mourn the end of his life, are -- every adenine, cytosine, guanine, and thymine --, losing that central helical organization that made out of those disparate chemicals, the man Francis Crick.
We will also think of his wife, the artist Odile Speed, and his three children -- each of whom perpetuates one-half of Francis Cricks's genome -- and his four grandchildren -- each of whom perpetuates one quarter of that genome.
(And of course, I gave Francis Crick the traditional Slashdot salute here [slashdot.org].)
The Theorist (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Were They Right, Though? (Score:4, Insightful)
Yes, pretty much.
We now have structures for a lot of molecules that interact with DNA. DNA that doesn't have Watson and Crick's proposed structure in general won't work with all the proteins that bind to DNA. Sure, you can also suggest that the conformations that these proteins adopt when crystallized are not identical to their in vivo shapes, but it all hangs together pretty consistently.
More recently, NMR has been used to determine protein structures for proteins in solution--this gets you much closer to the in vivo state, and these results generally line up well with the x-ray crystallographic structures.
Electron microscopy of DNA supports the double-helix structure.
NMR experiments also support the double helix under all but some weird circumstances. The Nucleic Acid Database at Rutgers has a very cool collection of NMR [rutgers.edu] and x-ray [rutgers.edu] DNA structures.
In general, DNA exists in a double-helix form. The weird examples above show what happens in a few unusual cases: They represent a vanishingly small proportion of normal DNA--stuff that wouldn't show up in Watson and Crick's work, or configurations that have been deliberately engineered. So yes--skepticism might have been warranted fifty years ago, but we've been past any uncertainty about the predominant form of DNA for decades.
The state of science (Score:5, Insightful)
A post on a pioneer of DNA research: under 200.
Let's hope the next generation of iPod can cure cancer, or we're all fucked.