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Comment by rend | Hacker News Reader

Regarding the Watson and Crick reference: it helps when you have other people like Rosalind Franklin working through the nights doing X-ray crystallography and taking the "pictures" that shed the real light on the structure of DNA. It leaves enough time to write the papers, do the PR, and get the credit. And, I guess, there's more than enough time left over for "chasing popsies."

http://webweekly.hms.harvard.edu/archive/2003/4_7/student_sc...

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"... it helps when you have other people like Rosalind Franklin working through the nights doing X-ray crystallography and taking the "pictures" that shed the real light on the structure of DNA. ..."

The 50th anniversary of the finding of the DNA structure meant a lot of new documentary information on the background to the race to find the structure of DNA. Firstly it shows the high degree of competitive rivalry between the players (Chargaff, Franklin, Pauling, Watson/Crick and Wilkins) to find the structure of DNA.

The key to finding the DNA structure was not just a fact of experimenting but assembling the pieces of the puzzle to create a workable theory. Each player had different pieces required in the puzzle

* Wilkins: who's earliest X-ray diffractions meant the dimensions could be calculated & who supplied Franklin with DNA samples.

* Franklin & Gosling: the X-ray diffraction pattern clearly showing the structure.

* Linus Pauling: Who's triple stranded DNA idea which turned out to be wrong but tipped off Watson & Cricks idea of a double helix.

* Watson: who knew the base pairing (AT & CG) fit all the dimensions

* Chargaff: who deduced the DNA ratios of A, T, G, C are equal

Then there was the technique. There is no doubt Franklin was the more analytic and systematic scientist compared to Watson and Crick who bumbled around like many of the others in the field building models. But Franklin had two things going against her. Firstly she working in a male dominated field. But more importantly she missed out on the benefit of teamwork. A lot this appears to stem from the personalities of Franklin and Maurice Wilkins. They simply didn't gel as a team as well as Watson & Crick. [0]

So the winners in this case could have been any of these players but it was Watson & Crick who happened to be at the right place and time understanding the smaller picture but more importantly having the imagination and freedom to think about how the pieces fit. Others supplied the information, they found the right theory to tie the information into a coherent idea. Watson and Crick didn't get the Nobel prize for just doing the basic science of discovering the structure of DNA. The pieces of the DNA puzzle lay in front of them. They get the recognition because they re-organised what information they had around them, come up with a theory that matched the data and wrote it up.

[0] Cold Spring Harbor Lab, DNAi, "Finding the Structure, Players", http://www.dnai.org/a/index.html

Good summary but you missed a critical point of serendipity. There are 230 possible symmetry groups a crystal can fall into. Franklin, as a crystallographer, knew them all. But Watson's PHD thesis involved a compound with the same symmetry as DNA, so he was much more prepared to recognize that one than Franklin was.

Err... As chemists Watson & Crick were light-years behind Franklin. They initially proposed a model of DNA where the phosphates were on the inside. When they showed it to Franklin she (along with other chemists) basically laughed at them, and the faculty ordered them to stop working the problem because they obviously didn't know what the hell they were doing.

Then they got a hold of Franklin's photograph of B-form DNA without her knowledge. Some sources say Wilkins, the guy who gave Watson & Crick the photograph stole it, others that he was just trying to be helpful, but they agree that Watson & Crick used Franklin's work without her permission to form their final model... with the phosphates where they belong, on the OUTSIDE, this time.

Franklin was very cautious and methodical: she wanted everything all lined up and double-checked before she published, and she didn't seem to realize just how important what she already had was. (She was after all a chemist, not a biologist). She wanted more data before she said conclusively what the correct model was.

Watson & Crick were rather impulsive, but courageous. Even though they were dead wrong the first time, they kept working and with Franklin's data managed to put together a cohesive, plausible model, which turned out to be right. They raced to publication, and didn't give Franklin any of the credit.

I'm not sure what you want to interpret from that about hard work, except that someone's hard work (in this case, that of Franklin) is usually required for a major success, and that if the hard worker isn't careful, he/she might not be the one to get the credit.

Sources: http://profiles.nlm.nih.gov/KR/Views/Exhibit/narrative/dna.h... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosalind_franklin

They were dead wrong the first time, yes, but they had the right symmetry. Watson was a much worse chemist, but he was prepared to recognize that symmetry.

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