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Sir Lawrence [Bragg, director of the Cavendish Laboratory of Cambridge University] was shown the paper in its nearly final form. After suggesting a minor stylistic alteration, he enthusiastically expressed his willingness to post it to Nature with a strong covering letter. The solution to the structure was bringing genuine happiness to Bragg. That the result came out of the Cavendish and not Pasadena [where Linus Pauling was at work on the same problem] was obviously a factor. More important was the unexpectedly marvelous nature of the answer, and the fact that the X-ray method he had developed forty years before was at the heart of a profound insight into the nature of life itself.
The final version was ready to be typed on the last weekend of March. Our Cavendish typist was not on hand, and the brief job was given to my sister. There was no problem persuading her to spend a Saturday afternoon this way, for we told her that she was participating in perhaps the most famous event in biology since Darwin’s book. Francis and I stood over her as she typed the nine-hundred-word article that began, “We wish to suggest a structure for the salt of deoxyribose nucleic acid (DNA). This structure has novel features which are of considerable biological interest.” On Tuesday the manuscript was sent up to Bragg’s office and on Wednesday, April 2, went of to the editors of Nature.
The Double Helix by James Watson
p. 221-222
C. had to read The Double Helix over Christmas break, so I read it, too.
Wonderful.
5 comments:
But never forget the great man himself.
Oh wow - what a great link!
I've got to read Origin of the Species.
There's a terrific film, The Race for the Double Helix,
with Tim Piggot Smith and Jeff Goldblum as Crick and Watson respectively. The story is unfair to Rosemary , they were not so sexist and she was not a competing bit player but a real colleague, but otherwsie, it's great.
The best part of the Double Helix, though, is that they won a nobel prize for THINKING. it was all a thought experiment--predicated on them being scientists, and with lots of science behind them, but they figured it out by tlaking and thinking. few achievements that great have been possible that way. would that we could all earn prizes for thinking!
eh must delete! sorry for the duplicates!
In the book they also seem to rely heavily on building physical models of the proposed gene structure.
It was a little hard for me to follow at the end (and I was reading too fast), but they seem to have more or less proved their theory to their own satisfaction by means of a physical model. The model was the test of their thinking & of the X-ray crystallography data they had.
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