James Watson, Francis Crick, Maurice Wilkins and Rosalind Franklin

In 1962 James Watson (1928- ), Francis Crick (1916- ), and Maurice Wilkins (1916- ) jointly received the Nobel Prize in medicine or physiology for their determination in 1953 of the structure of deoxyribonucleic social disease (desoxyribonucleic acid). Beca using up the Nobel Prize can be awarded only to the living, Wilkinss colleague Rosalind Franklin (1920-1958), who died from cancer at the age of thirty-seven, could not be honored.

James Watson and Francis Crick

The molecule that is the posterior for heredity, DNA, contains the patterns for constructing proteins in the body, including the various enzymes. A new understanding of heredity and hereditary disease was possible once it was determined that DNA consists of two custody twisted around each other, or double helixes, of alternating phosphate and sugar groups and that the two chains are held together by hydrogen bonds between pairs of perfect bases--adenine (A) with thymine (T) and guanine (G) with cytosine (C). Modern biotechnology in any case has its basis in the structural knowledge of DNA--in this case the scientists cleverness to modify the DNA of host cells that will then mother a desired product, for example, insulin.

The background for the work of the four scientists was organize by several scientific breakthroughs: the progress made by X-ray crystallographers in studying organic macromolecules; the growing state supplied by geneticists that it was DNA, not protein, in chromosomes that was responsible for heredity; Erwin Chargaffs data-based finding that there are equal numbers of A and T bases and of G and C bases in DNA; and Linus Paulings stripping that the molecules of some proteins have helical shapes--arrived at through the use of atomic models and a keen knowledge of the possible impulse of various atoms.

Of the four DNA researchers only Rosalind Franklin had university degrees in chemistry. The daughter of a prominent...

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