Ikigai Daily
Menu
WonderFact

In 1953 James Watson and Francis Crick in Cambridge proposed that DNA is a double helix, two strands twisted round each other. Their model depended on X-ray images and measurements made at King's College London by Rosalind Franklin and her student Raymond Gosling, and on work by Maurice Wilkins.

Nature, 25 April 1953

ScienceHistory

The story behind the card

X-ray diffraction means shining X-rays through a material and working out its structure from the pattern they scatter onto film. On 2 May 1952 Gosling, working under Franklin, took the sharp image now called Photo 51. In January 1953 Wilkins showed it to Watson without Franklin's permission, and Crick also saw a research report containing her calculations. The model appeared in Nature on 25 April 1953, alongside papers by Franklin and Gosling and by Wilkins's group. Watson, Crick and Wilkins received the 1962 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. Franklin had died of cancer in 1958, aged 37, and Nobel rules did not allow a prize to go to someone who had died. In 2023 the historians Matthew Cobb and Nathaniel Comfort, writing in Nature about newly found documents, argued that she was an equal player in solving the structure, not simply a victim whose photograph was taken.

Türkçe oku
James Watson ile Francis Crick 1953'te Cambridge'de, DNA'nın birbirine sarılmış iki zincirden oluşan bir çift sarmal olduğunu öne sürdü. Modelleri, Rosalind Franklin ile öğrencisi Raymond Gosling'in Londra'daki King's College'da elde ettiği X-ışını görüntülerine ve ölçümlere, ayrıca Maurice Wilkins'in çalışmalarına dayanıyordu.
Nature, 25 Nisan 1953

X-ışını kırınımı, bir maddeden X-ışını geçirip ışınların filme düşürdüğü desenden maddenin yapısını çıkarma yöntemidir. Franklin'in yanında çalışan Gosling, bugün Fotoğraf 51 diye bilinen net görüntüyü 2 Mayıs 1952'de çekti. Wilkins bu fotoğrafı Ocak 1953'te Franklin'den izin almadan Watson'a gösterdi; Crick de Franklin'in hesaplarını içeren bir araştırma raporunu gördü. Model 25 Nisan 1953'te Nature dergisinde, Franklin ile Gosling'in ve Wilkins'in ekibinin makaleleriyle yan yana yayımlandı. Watson, Crick ve Wilkins 1962 Nobel Fizyoloji veya Tıp Ödülü'nü aldı. Franklin 1958'de, 37 yaşında kanserden ölmüştü; Nobel kuralları ölmüş birine ödül verilmesine izin vermiyordu. Tarihçiler Matthew Cobb ile Nathaniel Comfort, 2023'te yeni bulunan belgelere dayanarak Nature'da yayımladıkları yazıda, Franklin'in yalnızca fotoğrafı elinden alınan biri olmadığını, yapının çözülmesinde eşit pay sahibi olduğunu savundu.

Sources and further reading

Background reading: DNA
Get the mobile appAbout our cards

Related cards

These cards share a subject or reading mode with the card above.

WonderHistory

The Industrial Revolution put the clock in charge of the working day. Before factories, most people worked by daylight, the seasons and the task in hand; from the 1770s, mills such as Richard Arkwright's at Cromford in Derbyshire ran day and night in twelve-hour shifts.

The historian E. P. Thompson traced this change in a famous essay of 1967, “Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism”. Farm and craft work, he argued, had been measured by tasks: milking, harvesting, finishing a piece. Factory work was measured in hours. Cromford Mill, opened in 1771, was the world's first water-powered cotton-spinning mill. It started with about 200 workers, most of them women and children, the youngest only seven. Bells rang at 5 in the morning and 5 in the evening, the gates were shut at exactly 6, and anyone late lost that day's pay and was fined another. In industrial towns, where alarm clocks were not yet cheap or reliable, “knocker-ups” were paid a few pence a week to tap on upstairs windows with long poles.

Ikigai DailyRead card
WonderHistory

Less than 66 years, well within a single lifetime, separate the first powered aeroplane flight from the first Moon landing. Orville Wright flew for 12 seconds and 37 metres on 17 December 1903; Apollo 11 landed on the Moon on 20 July 1969.

The Wright brothers, bicycle makers from Dayton, Ohio, flew near Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, and that first hop was shorter than the wingspan of a Boeing 747. What followed came fast. In 1919 John Alcock and Arthur Brown flew non-stop across the Atlantic; in 1927 Charles Lindbergh did it alone, from New York to Paris; and in 1947 Chuck Yeager flew faster than sound. Orville Wright died in 1948, nine years before the Soviet satellite Sputnik opened the space age. Yuri Gagarin orbited the Earth in 1961, and in July 1969 Neil Armstrong took a scrap of the 1903 Flyer's wood and fabric with him to the Moon.

Ikigai DailyRead card
WonderHistory

The Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union (1947–1991) was fought mostly without direct battles between the two. They competed instead through weapons, science, sport, films, propaganda and the race into space.

George Orwell used the phrase “cold war” in 1945, and the American journalist Walter Lippmann made it popular in 1947. Because nuclear weapons made open war between the superpowers too dangerous, the rivalry spread into other arenas. After the Soviet Union launched the Sputnik satellite in 1957, the United States passed the National Defense Education Act of 1958 to fund science, maths and language teaching. In 1959, at an American exhibition in Moscow, Vice-President Richard Nixon and the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev argued about capitalism and communism in a model kitchen, an exchange remembered as the Kitchen Debate. In 1972 in Reykjavík, the American Bobby Fischer beat the Soviet champion Boris Spassky for the world chess title. The Olympics were boycotted in turn: the United States and many allies stayed away from Moscow in 1980, and most of the Soviet bloc from Los Angeles in 1984.

Ikigai DailyRead card
WonderHistory

The Apollo Guidance Computer, which helped steer astronauts to the Moon, was one of the first computers built from integrated circuits: small silicon chips that each carry several electronic components. Until 1965, Apollo was the biggest user of these new chips.

The computer was designed at the MIT Instrumentation Laboratory from 1962 and built by Raytheon, and one flew in every Apollo command module and lunar module. The chip was still a new invention: Jack Kilby and Robert Noyce had made the first ones in 1958 and 1959. MIT used almost a single type throughout, a simple logic circuit designed by Fairchild Semiconductor, repeated thousands of times. According to the Computer History Museum, Apollo bought some 200,000 of them at 20 to 30 dollars each, and by 1965 the Minuteman missile programme had become the bigger buyer. Orders like these kept the young industry going until prices fell: the average chip cost 50 dollars in 1962 and 2.33 dollars in 1968. The Space Race is often credited with GPS too, but GPS was a separate US Department of Defense project, begun in 1973.

Ikigai DailyRead card
WonderHistory

On 12 April 1961 the Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin, aged 27, became the first human in space. His Vostok 1 spacecraft circled the Earth once, and the flight lasted 108 minutes from launch to landing.

Gagarin, who had trained as a foundry worker before becoming an air force pilot, was launched from Baikonur, in today's Kazakhstan. As the rocket lifted off he called out “Poyekhali!” (“Let's go!”). His orbit took him as high as 327 kilometres. On the way back he ejected from the capsule about 7 kilometres above the ground and came down by his own parachute near Engels, in the Saratov region, where a farm worker and her granddaughter were the first to meet him. Because the record rules of the day required pilots to land inside their craft, the Soviet Union claimed he had, and admitted the truth only in 1971. Gagarin became famous around the world. He died in a training-jet crash in 1968, aged 34. Since 2011 the United Nations has marked 12 April as the International Day of Human Space Flight.

Ikigai DailyRead card
Next card in the archiveOn 26 April 1986 reactor 4 of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant, in Soviet Ukraine, exploded during a safety test. A flawed reactor design, a badly run test and official secrecy made it one of the two worst nuclear accidents in history.Read next →