It was Wilkins’s idea to study DNA by X-ray crystallographic techniques, which he had already begun to implement when Franklin was appointed by Randall. Andrews in Scotland and then at King’s College London. Randall-who had undergone a similar conversion-first at the University of St. Like many other nuclear physicists, he became disillusioned with his subject when it was applied to the creation of the atomic bomb he turned instead to biophysics, working with his Cambridge mentor, John T. As a new PhD he worked during World War II on the improvement of cathode-ray tube screens for use in radar and then was shipped out to the United States to work on the Manhattan Project. King’s College London and Horace Freeland JudsonĪlready at work at King’s College was Maurice Wilkins, a New Zealand–born but Cambridge-educated physicist.
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In 1951 she returned to England to King’s College London, where her charge was to upgrade the X-ray crystallographic laboratory there for work with DNA. She returned briefly to Cambridge, where she presented a dissertation based on this work and was granted a PhD in physical chemistry.Īfter the war, through a French friend, she gained an appointment at the Laboratoire Centrale des Services Chimiques de l’Etat in Paris, where she was introduced to the technique of X-ray crystallography (see video on this page) and rapidly became a respected authority in this field. There she performed fundamental investigations on the properties of coal and graphite. She resigned her research scholarship in just one year to contribute to the war effort at the British Coal Utilization Research Association. She completed her degree in 1941 in the middle of World War II and undertook graduate work at Cambridge with Ronald Norrish, a future Nobel laureate. She attended Newnham College, one of the women’s colleges at Cambridge University. She was born into a prominent London banking family, where all the children-girls and boys-were encouraged to develop their individual aptitudes. Of the four DNA researchers, only Rosalind Franklin had any degrees in chemistry. The background for the work of the four scientists was formed by several scientific breakthroughs: the progress made by X-ray crystallographers in studying organic macromolecules the growing evidence supplied by geneticists that it was DNA, not protein, in chromosomes that was responsible for heredity Erwin Chargaff’s experimental finding that there are equal numbers of A and T bases and of G and C bases in DNA and Linus Pauling’s discovery that the molecules of some proteins have helical shapes-arrived at through the use of atomic models and a keen knowledge of the possible disposition of various atoms. Modern biotechnology also has its basis in the structural knowledge of DNA-in this case the scientist’s ability to modify the DNA of host cells that will then produce a desired product, for example, insulin. A new understanding of heredity and hereditary disease was possible once it was determined that DNA consists of two chains 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 organic bases-adenine (A) with thymine (T), and guanine (G) with cytosine (C). The molecule that is the basis for heredity, DNA, contains the patterns for constructing proteins in the body, including the various enzymes. There is a Nobel Prize stipulation that states “in no case may a prize amount be divided between more than three persons.” The fact she died before the prize was awarded may also have been a factor, although the stipulation against posthumous awards was not instated until 1974. The reasons for her exclusion have been debated and are still unclear.
Wilkins’s colleague Franklin (1920–1958), who died from cancer at the age of 37, was not so honored. 1928), Crick (1916–2004), and Wilkins (1916–2004) jointly received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for their 1953 determination of the structure of deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA). Franklin’s images allowed James Watson and Francis Crick to create their famous two-strand, or double-helix, model. At King’s College London, Rosalind Franklin obtained images of DNA using X-ray crystallography, an idea first broached by Maurice Wilkins.
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