No one knew how heredity (passing traits) worked until Gregor Mendel, an Austrian monk, crossbred pea plants in his monastery kitchen garden in 1865. In 1869, gene-hunters found rod-like shape in the nucleus of cells that turned red when dye was added. They named this “Chromosome”, from a Greek word, chroma for color. They also went deeper into the cell and discovered a wispy microscopic thread within the chromosomes, which they named DNA. There were several scientists who did not know about Mendel’s breakthrough at the time, but then in 1900, they rediscovered his experiment and old journal copies.
Francis Crick (American) and James D. Watson (Englishman) had a problem with DNA (Deoxyribonucleic Acid) in 1950 because the individual pieces could not be seen. They could be seen with x-ray crystallography which could be done in Kings College, London. They were convinced that DNA was a double helix spiral ladder that contained chemical strands of two to four. It consisted of two strands that were interwoven.
DNA was cracked! They solved the DNA three-dimensional structure at Cambridge, England and were ready to show the first model to their colleagues by March 7th, 1953. They learned how genes worked and how inherited features are passed down from one generation to the next. Their discovery was included in Matt Ridley’s book called Genome. People knew that heredity also affected animals and plants as it does humans. Having red hair or blue eyes gets passed on from one generation to the next one.
Watson met the King’s College team head named Maurice Wilkins, who worked closely with Rosalind Franklin. Rosalind Franklin, a British biophysicist, was the person who discovered the DNA structure using x-ray crystallogr...
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3. http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20080107200905AAl6RyT
4. http://www.cancerresearchuk.org/cancer-help/about-cancer/cancer-questions/what-is-dna-what-does-it-stand-for
5. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Watson
6. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_Crick
7. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heredity
8. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosalind_Franklin
9. http://ghr.nlm.nih.gov/handbook/basics/dna
10. https://www.genome.gov/25520880
11. http://www.statedclearly.com/
12. https://www.23andme.com/gen101/genes/
13. http://seedmagazine.com/images/uploads/12Cribsheet.pdf
14. http://ca.answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20081218195035AASs8Tw
15. https://s3.amazonaws.com/engrade-myfiles/4093573902791905/Chromosome_diagram.png
16. http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/07/110721142408.htm?utm_medium=twitter&utm_source=twitterfeed
Francis Crick: He does the same research with Watson and they are both teammates. He is also eager to know what is in DNA and the relationship of it with the double-helix, but at the same time is disorganised, and expected Watson to do a majority of work.
With a competitive spirit, people are driven to act in ways that they would not otherwise and the results can be drastic. In the case of James D. Watson and Francis Crick, in Watson’s novel the Double Helix, this sensation of competition leads to one of the greatest discoveries in biology. But the actions of Watson, Crick, and their competitors may or may not be justified for the results that they yield; the powerful conflict of rivalry has beneficial, detrimental, and questionably moral consequences that shaped the pathway to DNA’s structure.
The book Rosalind Franklin and DNA is a biography of Rosalind Franklin written by a British journalist and close friend of hers, Anne Sayre to reveal the true personality of Rosalind Franklin in contradiction to the fallacious character portrayed by James Watson in his personal account of The Double Helix. This book was undertaken to refute Franklin’s distorted portrait from abnormal feminist into rational, perfectionist and talented ‘women’ scientist. She begins by introducing her strong background, curious childhood, dedicated education, generous nature and most importantly how she was brought up in a favorable environment of distinctive Angelo-Jewish family, who identified and cultivated her talents and developed her in a person with full capacity for commitment. In this book, despite admiring the geniuses of Watson in depicting and picking out small information, connecting points and the kind of abilities he possessed was perfectly factitive with Crick that Rosalind and Gosling lacked however, she constantly tries to put the Rosalind’s side of story in picture which she believes was minimized in The Double Helix by Watson and correct her character that distorted in public eye.
They’re idea was to show that DNA had to copy itself during the cell division process. The point of this idea was that the DNA molecule make exact replicas of itself in order to pass to its “daughter cells”. Though the two groups were working separately, Watson saw the work that Franklin was doing in her lab, from her images they deduced that DNA might consist of two strands of DNA that were connected and shaped much like a spiral staircase. From seeing the images they decided on a model approach to prove their theory. They designed many variations all to no avail until they stumbled upon the right connects. Discovering that DNA was less like a Spiral staircase and more like a twisted ladder, they finally had the right configuration, a double helix. At this point of their experiment they were only missing one final clue. They needed to know how the different components of DNA bonded together. They found this answer with the help of an American named Jerry Donohue, a chemist who found that hydrogen bonding was the key. The hydrogen allowed the different components to bond together from a position on the inside to the structure and phosphates worked from the outside of the structure. Once all the pieces were discovered, Watson and Crick could finally construct their final product and write their paper. They noted the way DNA was constructed that it spoke of
In the first several chapters of The Double Helix, James Watson gives detailed descriptions of the places and people who were of some importance in this charade of science. Watson wrote of his personal history and of how he arrived at the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge. In this laboratory was a yet-unknown thirty-five year old man named Frances Crick . When Watson joined the team at Cavendish it was to help continue studies on the structure of proteins. Some of the people in the lab that Watson mentioned were Sir Lawr...
“On February 21, 1953, Watson could see the finished structure, he had recognized how two pairs of complementary bases (adenine-thymine and guanine-cytosine) would have identical shapes if held together by hydrogen bonds, two long chains of such base pairs would likely form a double helix—roughly, the shape of an enormously long, winding, doubled-railed staircase. The DNA molecule, comprised of long strands of such base pairs in specific and varied sequences, could embed genetic information that, if the strands were separated, could be copied.”
James D. Watson is a molecular biologist, geneticist and zoologist. He is well known as one of the two men who discovered DNA. The other man who helped discover DNA is Francis Crick. Francis is a biologist, neurologist and a biophysicist.
It was in 1984 when Alec Jeffreys, a British geneticist, discovered that specific sequences of DNA did not add to the function of a gene but were still constant throughout it. (Britannica). Jeffreys called these minisatellites and determined that each individual organism had a unique arrangement of minisatellites (Britannica). In the early uses of DNA fingerprinting, it was only used for identifying genetic diseases and disorders but people quickly realized that it could be used in many different areas of science (hubpages). Years after the discovery of DNA fingerprinting, it had been used to solve the first immigration case, the first paternity case, and even helped identify the first identical twins (le.ac.uk). The first methods of DNA fingerprinting were accurate, but you would have had needed to acquire a large amount of DNA. Over time, the advancement of science has led to major advances that formed the basis of DNA profiling techniques. These newer methods are still used today and allow scientist to use skin, blood, semen, and hair to gather DNA (le.ac.uk). In 1988 DNA fingerprinting was used for the first time in a criminal investigation. Timothy Spe...
Arguably one of the most influential (and outspoken) scientists of the twentieth century, James D. Watson played a significant role in revolutionizing the field of genetics and molecular biology. In his personal narrative, The Double Helix, Watson recounted his journey toward discovery--a discovery which he and many other prominent figures took to ultimately unravel the mysterious structure of DNA. Some of the viewpoints mentioned in his narrative are representative of beliefs many people shared during that time period as well as today. Specifically, I believe Watson’s views on Rosalind Franklin and competition within the scientific community
Rosalind was a scientest of the Concept 19 The DNA molecule is shaped like a twisted ladder. James Watson and Francis Crick solved the structure of DNA.
Simply put, DNA contains the instructions needed for an organism to develop, survive, and reproduce. The discovery and use of DNA has seen many changes and made great progress over many years. James Watson was a pioneer molecular biologist who is credited, along with Francis Crick and Maurice Wilkins, with discovering the double helix structure of the DNA molecule. The three won the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1962 for their work (Bagley, 2013). Scientists use the term “double helix” to describe DNA’s winding, two-stranded chemical structure.
Rosalind Franklin came into this world on July 25, 1920 in Notting Hill, London, into a Jewish family. She knew she would take the path of science at 15 years of age. She went to Newnham College in 1938, and earned Ph.D. in physical chemistry at Cambridge University. In 1941, Franklin earned Second class honors in the finals. She was accepted as a bachelors degree in the qualification for employment. She then went to Laboratoire Central des Services Chimiques de l”Etat (Central Laboratory of Chemical Services of the State) in France, 1946. In France, she worked with crystallographer Jacques Mering who taught her x-ray diffraction, which played a large part in her “the secret of life” that later helped with her structure of DNA. Franklin returned to London, and began working as a research associate at King’s College in the biophysics unit. John Randall used his expertise and x-ray diffraction techniques on DNA fibers.
In our world today DNA is very important. With the study of DNA comes DNA analysis. First one must know the definition of DNA and that is a deoxyribonucleic acid, which is a particle organized into a double helix. DNA is basically what has all genetic information and instructions for an organism (Rankin, 2013). Also James Watson discovered its first structure (Rankin, 2013). It is important to understand the structure and function of DNA and how this is connects to DNA analysis in forensic science (Rankin, 2013).
James Watson and Francis Crick were the two main scientists who discovered the double helix, the main structure of DNA. Two other scientists, named Rosalind Franklin and Maurice Wilkins, also helped and contributed along with James Watson and Francis Crick. However, they weren’t as famous because many people believed that they didn’t play as big of a role in the discovery. These scientists were trying to discover the structure of DNA. Their first discovery was the double helix, and Friedrich Miescher, a swiss chemist, discovered “nuclein” inside nuclei of white blood cells, which its name later changed to nucleic acid and then deoxyribonucleic acid, and abbreviated as DNA. Phoebus Levene, a Russian biochemist, discovered the makeup of nucleotides (phosphate and sugar bases) and all the different parts of both DNA (deoxyribose) and RNA (ribose). James Watson and Francis Crick used this information to determine how all of this DNA was made up and formed. They found that the basic molecule of DNA is called the double helix, and how each of the parts of the double helix were connected (the sugar-phosphate bases acted as the sides of the ladder or the stair rails and the nitrogen bases were the steps) and how they each were arranged. They also discovered about the four nitrogen bases, their shapes, and how you can re-organize them in different orders, but due to their shapes, A and T must be connected to each other and the same goes for G and C. DNA was discovered in the 1800s by various scientists, but James Watson and Francis Crick didn’t determine what the structure of DNA was until 1953. James Watson and Francis Crick met at Cambridge University and met Rosalind Franklin and Maurice Wilkins in London, England. The way that Watson and Crick discovered the structure is that they found that the shape of each nitrogen base and used reasoning to determine that G must fasten
Gregor Mendel, born as Johann Mendel, is considered to be one of the most significant historic scientist of all time. He was an Austrian scientist and monk and is best known as the “Father of Modern Genetics.” He founded the science of genetics and discovered many things that dealt with heredity that still applies to our world today. He is remembered for paving the way for scientists and future generations to come. Unfortunately, Mendel’s work went unnoticed until 16 years after his death and 34 years after he published his research. Though Mendel lay covered in his grave, his work would eventually be uncovered. Although Mendel was not there to see it,