This is fun…

All that and Rosalind Franklin’s Photo 51 was responsible for SHOWING the Double Helix. She was ignored. The Three Men Won the Nobel Prize.

I wonder if they worked with Operation Paperclip? This link is really something and just brings up more questions for me. Be sure and look at this website and it’s videos and the video below.

https://dnalc.cshl.edu/view/15470-The-moral-responsibility-of-scientists-in-Nazi-Germany-James-Watson.html

Francis Crick and James Watson, Molecular Biologists

8Histidine is the Amino Acid of a Galactic conflict. Still, at least their work was guided by our Sun. But look at the antipode; 8Threonine is death and change. And there is 6Serine, the Reptilians underneath. It’s pretty straight forward. “You would be wise to keep some of what you see under your hat for now.” The Reptilians back in 1953

Crick asked himself how it was possible that nature had simultaneously invented two mutually interdependent elements of life: the genetic material –nucleic acids, such as DNA or RNA– and the mechanism necessary to perpetuate it –the proteins called enzymes–.

The synthesis of the nucleic acids depends on the proteins; the amino acids, but the synthesis of the proteins depends on the nucleic acids. Faced with this chicken-and-egg problem, Crick and his colleague Leslie Orgel reasoned that life should have arisen in a place where there exists a “mineral or compound capable of replacing the function of the enzymes, and from there it would have been disseminated to other planets like Earth by “the deliberate activity of an extraterrestrial society.”

The truth is that directed panspermia does not detract from Crick’s thinking at all. Quite the contrary, it reveals the powerful workings of a theoretical, incisive and restless mind, eager for rational answers, even unconventional ones. To understand how Crick came to the idea of panspermia, we must go back a few years. The son of shoemaker Weston Favell (Northampton, UK), Francis Harry Compton Crick (June 8, 1916 – July 28, 2004) reached the end of his childhood with the main aspects of his identity already defined: his penchant for science. As for the first, he chose physics.

Molecular biology might have lost one of its founding fathers had it not been for the war. Crick began his research at University College, London working on what he described as “the dullest problem imaginable” – measuring the viscosity of water at high pressure and temperature. With the outbreak of World War II, he was drafted into the army to work on the design of mines. After the end of the conflict, he discovered that his equipment had been destroyed by a bomb (in his autobiography he spoke of a “land mine”), which allowed him to leave this tedious research.

Crick then had to choose a new field of research, and that was when he discovered what he called the gossip test: “what you are really interested in is what you gossip about.” In his case it was “the borderline between the living and the nonliving, and the workings of the brain,” in a nutshell – biology, or, as a physicist – biophysics. He began working on the structure of proteins in the Cavendish Laboratory of Cambridge, until he met an American named James Watson, twelve years younger than him but already with a PhD that Crick had not yet obtained for himself. Watson & Crick, and their DNA model in the Cavendish Laboratory (1953). Author: Antony Barrington Brown

The two researchers discovered that they shared a hypothesis. At that time it was believed that the seat of inheritance lay in proteins. Crick and Watson thought that genes resided in that unknown substance of the chromosomes, deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA). And that conviction, along with the participation of Maurice Wilkins and Rosalind Franklin, would give birth on February 28, 1953 to one of the greatest discoveries of twentieth century science, the double helix of DNA. The work was published in Nature on April 25 of that year. Crick would not obtain his PhD until the following year.

But although Crick is known primarily for being one of the founders of this milestone of molecular biology, the truth is that he himself laid the first rails of this new science. It was he who proposed that DNA was transcribed to RNA and that this was translated by means of adapter molecules in charge of converting the genetic code for proteins, the building blocks of life. And it was this “central dogma” of biology, as he himself baptized it, which led him to publish in 1973 his hypothesis of panspermia, by then such an elegant idea that it even counted astrophysicist Carl Sagan among its proponents.

Only years later would it be discovered that RNA can act by itself as an enzyme without the intervention of proteins, thus solving the problem that inspired panspermia. In 1993, Crick and Orgel published an article that no longer made any mention of an “extraterrestrial society”.  (Who shook that out of them? Scientists have always been pressured to agree with the Government/Military/D.S. narrative)The chicken-and-egg problem “could be resolved if, early in the evolution of life, nucleic acids acted as catalysts,” they wrote.

By this time Crick had changed continents and fields of study; in 1976 he moved to the Salk Institute in La Jolla (California, USA) for a one year sabbatical that would end up lasting for almost three decades. It was there that he settled his unfinished business with the second of his gossips: the brain. For the rest of his career, and in collaboration with neuroscientist Christof Koch, at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), he devoted himself to trying to locate consciousness in the brain matter. “You, your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambition, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules,” he wrote in 1994.

He never managed to unravel the problem of consciousness, although he made significant advances in the knowledge of visual perception. In 2004, he lost his battle against colon cancer, but never lost the courage or the passion for the study of life. According to Christof Koch, “he was editing a manuscript on his death bed, a scientist until the bitter end.”

This is from History.com

They saw Rosalind Franklin’s photo 51 of the DNA that SHOWED the double helix just before their announced their discovery. Her student Wilkins showed it to them but she never learned that he did that. Wilkens then shared in the Nobel Price so it was just the three men and Rosalind was ignored.

On February 28, 1953, Cambridge University scientists James D. Watson and Francis H.C. Crick announced that they have determined the double-helix structure of DNA, the molecule containing human genes. The molecular biologists were aided significantly by the work of another DNA researcher, Rosalind Franklin, although she is not included in the announcement, nor did she share the subsequent Nobel Prize award for it.

Though DNA—short for deoxyribonucleic acid—was discovered in 1869, its crucial role in determining genetic inheritance wasn’t demonstrated until 1943. In the early 1950s, Watson and Crick were only two of many scientists working on figuring out the structure of DNA. California chemist Linus Pauling suggested an incorrect model at the beginning of 1953, prompting Watson and Crick to try and beat Pauling at his own game. 

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On the morning of February 28, they determined that the structure of DNA was a double-helix polymer, or a spiral of two DNA strands, each containing a long chain of monomer nucleotides, wound around each other. According to their findings, DNA replicated itself by separating into individual strands, each of which became the template for a new double helix. In his best-selling book, The Double Helix (1968), Watson later claimed that Crick announced the discovery by walking into the nearby Eagle Pub and blurting out that “we had found the secret of life.” The truth wasn’t that far off, as Watson and Crick had solved a fundamental mystery of science–how it was possible for genetic instructions to be held inside organisms and passed from generation to generation.

Watson and Crick’s solution was formally announced on April 25, 1953, following its publication in that month’s issue of Nature magazine. The article revolutionized the study of biology and medicine. Among the developments that followed directly from it were pre-natal screening for disease genes; genetically engineered foods; the ability to identify human remains; the rational design of treatments for diseases such as AIDS; and the accurate testing of physical evidence in order to convict or exonerate criminals.

Crick and Watson later had a falling-out over Watson’s book, which Crick felt misrepresented their collaboration and betrayed their friendship. 

A larger controversy arose over the use Watson and Crick made of work done by another DNA researcher, Rosalind Franklin. Colleague Maurice Wilkins showed Watson and Crick Franklin’s X-ray photographic work to Watson just before he and Crick made their famous discovery. The imagery established that the DNA molecule existed in a helical conformation. When Crick and Watson won the Nobel Prize in 1962, they shared it with Wilkins. Franklin, who died in 1958 of ovarian cancer and was thus ineligible for the award, never learned of the role her photos played in the historic scientific breakthrough.

Citation Information

Article Title

Chemical structure of DNA discovered

Author

History.com Editors

Website Name

HISTORY

URL

https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/watson-and-crick-discover-chemical-structure-of-dna

Access Date

March 22, 2021

Publisher

A&E Television Networks

Last Updated

March 2, 2021

Original Published Date

November 24, 2009TAGSSCIENCEBY HISTORY.COM EDITORS

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