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medpundit |
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Friday, April 25, 2003Over at Nature they have a whole web page devoted to the subject, including this playful essay about DNA and the meaning of life. Watson and Crick get most of the credit, but it’s fitting to remember Rosalind Franklin, whose X-ray diffraction photographs of DNA were instrumental in pointing out the molecule’s structure. She died of ovarian cancer in her late 30’s, before she could share the Nobel prize. The New England Journal of Medicine has a book review (subscription required) of a recent biography about her, Rosalind Franklin: The Dark Lady of DNA which disclosed an interesting aspect of the education of women in pre-World War II England: Franklin was born in 1920 into an upper-middle-class banking family, which "stood high in Anglo-Jewry" — part of the establishment to be sure, yet never fully English. She developed as an outsider. Early on, she declared herself a scientist (and, by implication, not a banker). Having been referred to as "alarmingly clever," she went up to Cambridge in 1938, where she found an institution that first admitted women in 1869 but would not grant them the degree of B.A. Two years after she received her Ph.D. in 1946 for internationally recognized research on coal, Franklin's undergraduate degree was awarded retroactively. So what were those women expected to do there if they weren’t entitled to a degree? Hunt for husbands? Or just provide comfort care for the male undergraduates? We’ve truly come a long way. By the way, that NPR link above also includes a lot of other great DNA links, such as a Talk of the Nation segment with James Watson. And CharlesMurtaugh has a post on why you can’t believe everything James Watson says. (scroll down to Thursday, April 24. Archive links are broken, as is the case throughout all of Blogspotdom. Why do we all stick with it? Because it’s free!) posted by Sydney on 4/25/2003 09:06:00 PM 0 comments 0 Comments: |
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