As promised, heres the back story of our mystery book trailer person, Rosalind Franklin, embedded in an excerpt from Time Tunnel: The Towers. Many believe Rosalind Franklin deserved the Nobel Prize that was awarded to Watson, Crick, and Wilkins for discovery of the double helix structure of the DNA molecule. Read on... Lara Meredith was born on the Ides of March in 1945 in Waxahachie Texas to an insurance agent father and a stay-at-home mother. From an early age, she demonstrated an outsized aptitude for math – so much so that her parents were convinced that they had brought the wrong baby home from the hospital. A math and science prodigy in her childhood years, she skipped two grades in elementary school and graduated from Waxahachie Global High School at the age of 16. In 1962, while Lara studied biology at the University of Texas, Francis Crick and James Watson were awarded the Nobel Prize in Medicine for their discovery of the double helix structure of DNA. Watson and Crick shared their prize with Maurice Wilkins, a molecular biologist at Kings College. Their work hooked Lara on the field of genomics. As Lara studied Crick, Watson, and Wilkins’ research, she stumbled on references to a Rosalind Franklin, whose work at Kings College with X-Ray diffraction had contributed to Crick and Watson’s discovery. Dismissed by Crick and Watson as a minor player in the quest to divine the structure of DNA, Franklin had virtually disappeared from the story of one of the greatest discoveries of the twentieth century. The deeper Lara drilled into the backstory, the more skeptical she became that Franklin’s role was really the bit part that the Nobel Laureates had assigned her. She discovered that one of Dr. Franklin’s painstaking X-ray diffraction images of DNA, the so called “Photo 51,” had produced the eureka moment that drove Crick and Watson’s discovery of the molecule’s double helix structure. The grainy photo depicted a horizontal series of smudges that formed an “X” shape. The X shape image resulted from X-rays bouncing, or diffracting, off the DNA molecule’s atoms, revealing the helix structure of the molecule. Gaps in the “X” indicated that a second helix was present, intertwined with the first. Franklin understood DNA’s double helical structure well prior to Watson and Crick’s epiphany. Franklin also understood the correct orientation of the phosphates and sugars relative to the base pairs, though Watson and Crick, weak on chemistry, stubbornly insisted that hydrophobic material should be exposed, unprotected, on the outside of their model. Maurice Wilkins had a rocky relationship with Franklin, whom he treated as more of a subordinate than an equal. Without Franklin’s knowledge or permission, he leaked her research, including Photo 51, to Crick and Watson. His subterfuge netted a Nobel Prize for himself, Crick, and Watson, and left Franklin an obscure footnote in the annals of genomic research. In his bestselling book, The Double Helix, Watson devoted considerable ink to criticism of Dr. Franklin, writing, By choice she did not emphasize her feminine qualities. Though her features were quite strong, she was not unattractive and might have been quite stunning had she taken even a mild interest in clothes. She did not. There was never lipstick to contrast with her straight black hair, while at the age of thirty-one her dresses showed all the imagination of English blue-stocking adolescents.” Lara was incensed. Watson was describing a brilliant Cambridge Ph.D. scientist from whom he may well have hustled the Nobel Prize. Describing Franklin by her dress and makeup was like the Nobel Committee evaluating the scientific merits of Watson’s achievement by taking inventory of the mop like comb over of his receding hairline, his bad teeth, bug eyes, and a physique better suited for a praying mantis than a steamy stud muffin male. Lara wrote a paper about Rosalind Franklin, presenting her evidence that Dr. Franklin deserved the Nobel Prize that was bestowed upon Watson, Crick, and Wilkins. The paper was poorly received by UT faculty members, who did not look kindly on an upstart like Lara sullying the gods of genomics. Lara decided it was time to move on. She earned her Ph.D. from Stanford and then became an Associate Professor at Columbia in 1970 at the ripe old age of 25. On her first day at work at Columbia, her new lab boss asked her to fetch him a cup of coffee. She returned with a glass Erlenmeyer chemistry flask full of a steaming dark liquid and set it on his desk. “What’s that?” her boss asked. “Where I come from, we call it coffee,” she replied. Their eyes met in a brief stare down, before her boss laughed out loud. Dr. Meredith was going to be a handful. He gamely drank his coffee out of the flask and never asked her to make it again.
Posted on: Sat, 10 Jan 2015 17:25:02 +0000
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