Forty Years of Beatles: Fifty
Years of DNA
Andrea McAdam
On 16th February 1963, The Beatles released their first hit, Please Please Me. On 25th April 1953, Nature published a brief paper by JD Watson & FHC Crick titled A Structure for Deoxyribose Nucleic Acid (1). In the 40 and 50 years since these events the Beatles and DNA have both become household words. From our perspective today, the second sentence of Watson and Crick’s paper is an ironic understatement: “This structure has novel features which are of considerable biological interest”.
The progress since 1953 is well beyond what any of the original protagonists may have envisaged. The ‘considerable biological interest’ they foreshadowed has given rise to diverse applications of the knowledge – from genome sequencing to nanotechnology; from medical diagnostics and gene therapy, to art and architecture.
A special feature in Nature to mark the anniversary offers a wide range of reflections on the events of 1953 and since; the people, the progress, the potential still unrealised. It is accessible free online at www.nature.com/nature/DNA50/ and includes archival reproductions such as the original journal paper, and articles from the 21st anniversary in 1974.
Not
all the mysteries of this elegant, enigmatic and essential molecule have been
solved, however. As Philip Ball comments in his article Portrait of a
molecule, “How many celebrations of the double helix will admit that 50 years
on, we don’t really know what DNA at large in the cell looks like?” (2).
James Watson, Francis Crick and Maurice Wilkins jointly received the Nobel Prize for Physiology and Medicine in 1962 for their work on DNA structure. One key researcher who co-published in that landmark issue of Nature was missing from the Nobel awards. Rosalind Franklin, the X-ray crystallographer whose photographs of the diffraction images of DNA crystals were so influential in confirming Watson and Crick’s putative helical model, died of cancer on 16th April 1958, not quite five years after the momentous publication. She was 37.
Having read years ago the popular account written by Watson in 1968, The Double Helix (3), and been slightly troubled by the portrayal of Franklin more as a termagant than a colleague and expert scientist, I enjoyed reading last year a biography of her written in 1975 and reissued in 2000. This book, Rosalind Franklin and DNA by Anne Sayre (4), redressed the balance and provided a detailed portrait of a brilliant woman whose research career abruptly and prematurely ceased. Sayre has been criticised for weighing too heavily in the other direction and setting Franklin up as a “wronged heroine cast as a feminist icon by her premature death and mysogynist treatment by the male scientific world” (5) by Brenda Maddox, who has written another biography, Rosalind Franklin: The Dark Lady of DNA (6). The book is to be released in paperback this month. I look forward to reading it because it is the insight into the life and humanity of such scientists that continues to remind me that a career is made up of ordinary days, and that great discoveries are the sum of painstaking individual observations, experiments and conclusions just as the human body (and most other life forms) are quietly constructed from the basis of the tiny double helix that is DNA. Happy 50th Anniversary!
References
Watson JD, Crick FHC. A Structure for Deoxyribose Nucleic Acid. Nature 1953; 4356: 737
Ball P. Portrait of a molecule. Nature 2003; 421: 421-422
Watson JD. The Double Helix. New York: Athenaeum; 1968
Sayre A. Rosalind Franklin and DNA. New York: Norton; 1987 (pb); reissued 2000.
Maddox B. The double helix and the ‘wronged heroine’. Nature 2003; 421: 407-408
Maddox B. Rosalind Franklin: The Dark Lady of DNA. London: HarperCollins; 2002
Andrea McAdam is a Medical Scientist working full time in Diagnostic Haematology / Blood Bank at the Royal Melbourne Hospital. She teaches Immunology at RMIT TAFE (in her spare time!) and has hankerings to work somewhere with interesting tropical diseases, because she loves microscopy and parasites.
Women in X-ray crystallography
By Diana Temple
There
has been a tradition of first-class women chemists achieving highly in the
field of X-ray crystallography, particularly in England. Perhaps the most
notable is Dr Rosalind Franklin whose X-ray diffraction analysis was a
critical component of the discovery of the structure of DNA.
Dame Kathleen Lonsdale, the century of whose birth is commemorated in Chemistry in Britain (Jan 2003) overcame hindrances (marriage and 3 children, plus social mores of the period) to carve out an early career at University College London, with the support of Sir William Bragg. She established that the benzene ring is planar, and applied Fourier methods to analyse X-ray patterns, doing the complex calculations at home by hand. She was one of the first two women to be elected a Fellow of the Royal Society.
Almost contemporary was Professor Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin of London and Oxford, famed for her X-ray crystallographic analysis of complex molecular structures, for example penicillin and Vitamin B12. She won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1964, becoming one of few women Nobel Laureates. Britain then awarded her an Order of Merit - the first woman OM since Florence Nightingale.
