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Books > Science & Mathematics > Biology, life sciences > Life sciences: general issues > Genetics (non-medical) > DNA
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Rosalind Franklin and DNA (Paperback, New Ed)
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Discovery Miles 4 560
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Rosalind Franklin and DNA (Paperback, New Ed)
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List price R504
Loot Price R456
Discovery Miles 4 560
You Save R48 (10%)
Expected to ship within 10 - 15 working days
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James Watson's Double Helix, an account of his work on the
structure of the DNA molecule, has been delighting lay audiences
since 1968, but was greeted with suspicion from the start by many
scientists, including Watson's co-worker Francis Crick and the
third Nobel laureate Maurice Wilkins. Some claimed that Watson had
not given colleagues due credit; others objected to
science-for-the-layman with so profoundly distorting an emphasis on
personalities, trivial circumstances, and sheer brainless
competition for its own sake. Watson countered that he was
portraying things not as they "were" but as they looked to him in
his salad days (1953). Not a very satisfactory answer; the brash
24-year-old's disingenuous hornblowing has still shaped more
people's idea of science than the broader, more impartial picture.
The gap between the two is pointed out with missionary zeal by Anne
Sayre, a personal friend of the late RoSalind Franklin. Franklin,
who appears in Watson's book as "Rosy," a cranky, unattractive,
humorless, uppity underling of Maurice Wilkins at Kings College
(where a line of research was being pursued parallel to Watson and
Crick's simultaneous work at Cambridge), came to molecular biology
by way of physical chemistry. She had worked first on coal
microstructures, then on crystallography - where she mastered the
X-ray diffraction techniques which formed her chief line of
approach to the DNA question. Sayre presents a wholly different
version of what Watson calls the "race" to discover the molecule's
structure: nobody except Watson knew there was supposed to be a
race; if Wilkins and Franklin (equals, not superior and
cantankerous subordinate) had not hated each other they would have
made more rapid headway on the DNA problem; in any case Franklin
would have discovered the correct solution on her own in three
months or maybe three weeks (Francis Crick's opinion); Watson could
not have found the answer when he did without semi-clandestine
briefings on Franklin's progress; Franklin might well have replaced
Wilkins as the third laureate had she not died in 1958, four years
before the Nobel award. The experts and the surviving members of
the original teams will have to thrash out the facts among them;
what is clear is that - aside from an overly didactic, magisterial
tone - Sayre makes an extremely sharp: and impassioned case.
Deserves wide attention. (Kirkus Reviews)
Rosalind Franklin's research was central to the discovery of the
double-helix structure of DNA. She never received the credit she
was due during her lifetime.
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