Thanks Dave. Got it today.

The moon is made of green cheese. Now you know.



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There's a hole in my creativity bucket and it's all leaked out.

Sarah B wrote:

> The moon is made of green cheese. Now you know.
>


Absolute tosh.

It's more a sort of beige coloured cheese. Maybe a very dry Wensleydale.



PSD

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This is the work of an Italian narco-anarchic collective. Don't bother insulting them, they can't read English anyway.

isn't Wensleydale one of Wallace's favorite cheeses? Or is that Grommitt's? I can never remember!

AAC: Yes. Our family's euphemism for cheese is "not even Wensleydale"
As in "do you fancy some not even Wensleydale for tea ?"

PSD: Yes. 'The Eagle' which is opposite King's college although it was shut for a refurb when I was there. As opposed to 'The Eagle and Child' in Oxford which is where the Inklings met.

Ook: I'm not sure of all the details. From what I know, the main problem was that Rosalind Franklin didn't get on with her boss (Maurice Wilkins) down in London. She certainly didn't get the credit at the time. I would guess quite a few bosses still pass off good results of the research fellows and students as their own...

Okay, I've been doing some research on the whole 'Dark Lady' thingummy, and the overwhelming impression is that Franklin missed out on a lot of credit, but that the controversy has been built up significantly by feminists wishing to prove that science is a boy's club and wasn't helped by Watson's comments in his own account of the discovery.

It seems that Franklin's famous photo of the structure of DNA was shown to Watson by Wilkins (her colleague, not boss) without Franklin's permission or prior knowledge, and this allowed Watson to deduce that the DNA molecule was indeed helical. That Watson grasped this so quickly without a copy of the photo provides at least incidental evidence that Watson and Crick were thinking along those lines.

The key to understanding DNA came from the realisation that the sugar phosphate backbone must run in two different directions (something Franklin never spotted) and also from "Chargaff's rules" (the observation that the bases A & T, and C & G had a ratio of one to one with each other). The major leap was being able to place the bases on the inside, this allowed for the self-replication of DNA - in one of the biggest understatements in science -

"It has not escaped our notice that the specific pairing we have postulated immediately suggests a possible copying mechanism for the genetic material."

Crucially, Watson and Crick were also prepared to make a model of the molecule to test their proposed structure - it was the simplicity and elegance of this structure that convinced them it was right.

As for credit, in the same edition of Nature as the Watson and Crick paper was a paper by Wilkins and Franklin supporting their findings, including the infamous Photograph Number 51. Credit was also given in the Watson and Crick paper -

"We have also been stimulated by a knowledge of the general nature of the unpublished experimental results and ideas of Dr. M. H. F. Wilkins, Dr. R. E. Franklin and their co-workers at King's College, London."

Finally, as for the Nobel there are two things complicating any award Franklin should have received. Firstly the prize may be shared by no more than 3 people. Watson and Crick actually discovered and described the structure, so were obviously deserving. As Wilkins and Franklin had both provided important evidence it would have been hard to separate them, and so the prize probably would have gone to Watson and Crick alone. However objection number two now comes into play, which is that prizes are not awarded post-humously, so Franklin would have missed out regardless.

Anyone wanting to know more should check out the original paper - Nature 171: 737 (1953) - at

(http://biocrs.biomed.brown.edu/Books/Chapters/Ch%208/DH-Paper.html)

and the two excellent book reviews by KMP at

[www.amazon.com]

and

[www.amazon.com]

Hope that clears it all up.

EDIT --> typo removed! Cheers Rob!



Post Edited (03-03-03 17:22)

PSD

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This is the work of an Italian narco-anarchic collective. Don't bother insulting them, they can't read English anyway.

Cheers. That seems like a good summary to me. I'd heard the

> Firstly the prize may be
> shared by no more than 3 people. Watson and Crick actually
> discovered and described the structure, so were obviously
> deserving. As Wilkins and Franklin had both provided importance
> evidence it would have been hard to separate them, and so the
> prize probably would have gone to Watson and Crick alone.

bit before and tend to believe it's probably as near the truth as we'll ever get.

It's always going to be a contentious point, but IMHO I think that Wilkins was lucky to get a prize. What's often forgotten about Franklin is that she wasn't just a scientist who had one good photograph - she was the first person to work out how to get DNA into good enough shape for crystallography, for starters. It needed treatment to get it into mostly the beta form. She also made several contributions to crystallography in general and to virology before her untimely death. Whether she could have got the structure of DNA herself is highly dubious - it needed a chemist to do it really and she wasn't working with one - unlike Watson.



PSD

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This is the work of an Italian narco-anarchic collective. Don't bother insulting them, they can't read English anyway.

Rob said:
> I would guess quite a few bosses still pass off good results of the >research fellows and students as their own...

*cough* Tony Blair *cough* Iraq dossier *cough*

hmmm.... a typo in the last sentence originally gave our illustrious Premier's name as B-liar. Amazing the tabloids haven't picked up on that one yet!



I drink to drown my sorrows. Unfortunately they've learnt how to swim.

Re DNA

I shall nod wisely and pretend I understood some of that, for when it comes to Science I am a bear of very little brain, and Long Words Bother Me.



- - -
I am very interested in the Universe. I am specialising in the Universe and everything surrounding it. - E. L. Wisty

In our family, he is Mr Bleah. Kinda like a snoopy-thing going on there.

I don't suppose the tabloids would pick up on it, because they like having a newspaper. (ahem, if you call it that)

And Ben, it's not Wensleydale. I believe Wallace himself told us so in 'A Grand Day Out'.

(So know you know - I watch too much TV!)



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There's a hole in my creativity bucket and it's all leaked out.

I've given up on tabloids. Most pof them would only cover Iraq if Kylie's arse was found in the desert...

I'm still surprised that B-liar's right hand ape hasn't become more widely recognised as Geoff 'Buff' Hoon.



Post Edited (03-04-03 11:29)

PSD

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This is the work of an Italian narco-anarchic collective. Don't bother insulting them, they can't read English anyway.

Alas, whatever was once in the forum has fallen into a memory hole; I can find no clues about the dodo. How far did the dodo walk into the Forest of Dean? Help...

He walked HALFWAY.

But I'm stuck on the next puzzle. Any help out there????

I dont know - we try terribly hard for weeks not to just write the bloody answer down and only to leave hints, and then somebody gets terribly over-excited and blurts it out. It just doesn't seem cricket, somehow.

And there was a huge thread talking about the bloody dodo, somewhere. We pobably just moved onto stranger topics after the first five posts or so...



PSD

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This is the work of an Italian narco-anarchic collective. Don't bother insulting them, they can't read English anyway.

Seems kind of pointless to have people just give the answers away doesn't it?

Hints are good--- if they are good hints that is

Well, I never claimed we gave any good hints...



PSD

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This is the work of an Italian narco-anarchic collective. Don't bother insulting them, they can't read English anyway.