Double-Helix Model of DNA Paper Published 59 Years Ago 112
pigrabbitbear writes with musings on the anniversary of the groundbreaking paper on DNA structure by Watson and Crick. From the article: "Consider every organism that's ever lived on Earth. From dinosaurs to bacteria, the number is near infinite, and an overwhelming majority have their entire structures and lives dictated according to their DNA. The DNA molecule is life itself, and it's astonishing that we've only known what it looks like for less than a century. But it's true: In one of the most groundbreaking papers ever published, James D. Watson and Francis Crick described the double-helix structure of DNA in Nature, 59 years ago today."
Re:Why now? (Score:3, Informative)
60 is a multiple of 10.
Humans have 10 fingers.
Near Infinite (Score:5, Informative)
Consider every organism that's ever lived on Earth. From dinosaurs to bacteria, the number is near infinite, and an overwhelming majority have their entire structures and lives dictated according to their DNA
The number of organisms that ever lived is as close to infinity as the amount of protons in the cosmos. No where near to infinite at all.
Are you kidding? (Score:5, Informative)
60 is a wonderful number [wikipedia.org]. It is both a unitary perfect number and a Harshad number. It's the smallest number that can be expressed as the sum of two odd primes in 6 ways. It has many nice geometric representations resulting from its highly composite nature.
Of course this is all redundant, because there is no such thing as an uninteresting natural number [wikipedia.org].
Re:Wasn't there a woman scientist involved ? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Why now? (Score:4, Informative)
59 is 323 in base 4. Does that make it better? :)
(Mostly-irrelevant trivia: various modifications like methylation actually let DNA carry more information than just 2 bits per bp. A related molecule, RNA, has a large number of other special bases that are inserted to perform special functional roles, as well.)
Re:Rosalind Franklin (Score:4, Informative)
There is a book dedicated to this very subject.
http://www.nature.com/embor/journal/v4/n1/full/embor723.html [nature.com]
Re:Wasn't there a woman scientist involved ? (Score:4, Informative)
Rosalind Franklin [wikipedia.org] was the one who actually made and interpreted the x-ray diffraction images of DNA. Then her work was shown to Watson and Crick, behind her back, who published their model of the double helix and got famous.
This is basically correct, but I think that both the contribution of the diffraction images, and the degree to which Watson and Crick behaved unethically, tends to be somewhat overstated. Franklin actually published her results in the same issue of Nature as the double helix model. The main reason why this affair is remembered is because Watson published a rather uncomplimentary account of Franklin in his book The Double Helix (short summary: he thought she was a good scientist, but a raging feminist bitch). Franklin was at that point long since dead and could not defend herself. Watson also has a long history of pissing people off.
If nothing else, the real reason Franklin isn't more famous isn't that Watson screwed her: she died of ovarian cancer at age 37, four years before Watson and Crick won the Nobel prize (along with Maurice Wilkins, who really didn't deserve it).
Re:Why now? (Score:5, Informative)
Less irrelevant trivia: As usual, everybody is getting all fuzzy eyed about Watson (who was a flaming asshole [smithsonianmag.com]) and Crick (who was a really nice guy and the brains of the outfit). But it's easy to forget Rosalind Frankilin [wikipedia.org] who did much of the heavy lifting that Watson & Crick tend to get credit for.
As even they have said, once you see the structure, the general mechanism is pretty obvious.