The Gene
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and Erbkrank: “1936—Rassenpolitisches Amt der NSDAP—Erbkrank,” Internet Archive, https://archive.org/details/1936-Rassenpolitisches-Amt-der-NSDAP-Erbkrank.
in Leni Riefenstahl’s Olympia: Olympia, directed by Leni Riefenstahl, 1936.
In November 1933:” Holocaust timeline,” History Place, http://www.historyplace.com/worldwar2/holocaust/timeline.html.
In October 1935, the Nuremberg Laws: “Key dates: Nazi racial policy, 1935,” US Holocaust Memorial Museum, http://www.ushmm.org/outreach/en/article.php?ModuleId=10007696.
By 1934, nearly five thousand adults: “Forced sterilization,” US Holocaust Memorial Museum, http://www.ushmm.org/learn/students/learning-materials-and-resources/mentally-and-physically-handicapped-victims-of-the-nazi-era/forced-sterilization.
to euthanize their child, Gerhard: Christopher R. Browning and Jürgen Matthäus, The Origins of the Final Solution: The Evolution of Nazi Jewish Policy, September 1939–March 1942 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska, 2004), “Killing the Handicapped.”
Working with Karl Brandt: Ulf Schmidt, Karl Brandt: The Nazi Doctor, Medicine, and Power in the Third Reich (London: Hambledon Continuum, 2007).
No. 4 Tiergartenstrasse in Berlin: Götz Aly, Peter Chroust, and Christian Pross, Cleansing the Fatherland, trans. Belinda Cooper (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994), “Chapter 2: Medicine against the Useless.”
The Sterilization Law had achieved: Roderick Stackelberg, The Routledge Companion to Nazi Germany (New York: Routledge, 2007), 303.
“banality of evil”: Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (New York: Viking, 1963).
In a rambling treatise entitled: Otmar Verschuer and Charles E. Weber, Racial Biology of the Jews (Reedy, WV: Liberty Bell Publishing, 1983).
First they came for the Socialists: J. Simkins, “Martin Niemoeller,” Spartacus Educational Publishers, 2012, http://spartacus-educational.com/GERniemoller.htm.
Trofim Lysenko: Jacob Darwin Hamblin, Science in the Early Twentieth Century: An Encyclopedia (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2005), “Trofim Lysenko,” 188–89.
“gives one the feeling of a toothache”: David Joravsky, The Lysenko Affair (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 59. Also see Zhores A. Medvedev, The Rise and Fall of T. D. Lysenko, trans. I. Michael Lerner (New York: Columbia University Press, 1969), 11–16.
The gene, he argued: T. Lysenko, Agrobiologia, 6th ed. (Moscow: Selkhozgiz, 1952), 602–6.
In 1940, Lysenko: “Trofim Denisovich Lysenko,” Encyclopedia Britannica Online, http://www.britannica.com/biography/Trofim-Denisovich-Lysenko.
“I am nothing but dung now”: Pringle, Murder of Nikolai Vavilov, 278.
died a few weeks later: A number of Vavilov’s colleagues, including Karpechenko, Govorov, Levitsky, Kovalev, and Flayksberger, were also arrested. Lysenko’s influence virtually emptied the Soviet academy of all geneticists. Biology in the Soviet Union would be hobbled for decades.
Having coined the phrase: James Tabery, Beyond Versus: The Struggle to Understand the Interaction of Nature and Nurture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2014), 2.
In 1924, Hermann Werner Siemens: Hans-Walter Schmuhl, The Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Human Heredity, and Eugenics, 1927–1945: Crossing Boundaries (Dordrecht: Springer, 2008), “Twin Research.”
Between 1943 and 1945: Gerald L. Posner and John Ware, Mengele: The Complete Story (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1986).
“We were always sitting together—always nude”: Lifton, Nazi Doctors, 349.
In April 1933: Wolfgang Benz and Thomas Dunlap, A Concise History of the Third Reich (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), 142.
“Hitler may have ruined”: George Orwell, In Front of Your Nose, 1946–1950, ed. Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus (Boston: D. R. Godine, 2000), 11.
a lecture later published as: Erwin Schrödinger, What Is Life?: The Physical Aspect of the Living Cell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1945).
“That Stupid Molecule”
Never underestimate the power of . . . stupidity: Walter W. Moore Jr., Wise Sayings: For Your Thoughtful Consideration (Bloomington, IN: AuthorHouse, 2012), 89.
“The Fess”: “The Oswald T. Avery Collection: Biographical information,” National Institutes of Health, http://profiles.nlm.nih.gov/ps/retrieve/Narrative/CC/p-nid/35.
No one knew or understood the chemical structure: Robert C. Olby, The Path to the Double Helix: The Discovery of DNA (New York: Dover Publications, 1994), 107.
Swiss biochemist, Friedrich Miescher: George P. Sakalosky, Notio Nova: A New Idea (Pittsburgh, PA: Dorrance, 2014), 58.
extremely “unsophisticated” structure: Olby, Path to the Double Helix, 89.
“stupid molecule”: Garland Allen and Roy M. MacLeod, eds., Science, History and Social Activism: A Tribute to Everett Mendelsohn, vol. 228 (Dordrecht: Springer Science & Business Media, 2013), 92.
“structure-determining, supporting substance”: Olby, Path to the Double Helix, 107.
“primordial sea”: Richard Preston, Panic in Level 4: Cannibals, Killer Viruses, and Other Journies to the Edge of Science (New York: Random House, 2009), 96.
“Who could have guessed it?”: Letter from Oswald T. Avery to Roy Avery, May 26, 1943, Oswald T. Avery Papers, Tennessee State Library and Archives.
Avery wanted to be doubly sure: Maclyn McCarty, The Transforming Principle: Discovering That Genes Are Made of DNA (New York: W. W. Norton, 1985), 159.
“cloth from which genes were cut”: Lyon and Gorner, Altered Fates, 42.
Oswald Avery’s paper on DNA was published: O. T. Avery, Colin M. MacLeod, and Maclyn McCarty, “Studies on the chemical nature of the substance inducing transformation of pneumococcal types: Induction of transformation by a deoxyribonucleic acid fraction isolated from pneumococcus type III,” Journal of Experimental Medicine 79, no. 2 (1944): 137–58.
That year, an estimated 450,000 were gassed: US Holocaust Memorial Museum, “Introduction to the Holocaust,” Holocaust Encyclopedia, http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10005143.
In the early spring of 1945: Ibid.
The Eugenics Record Office: Steven A. Farber, “U.S. scientists’ role in the eugenics movement (1907–1939): A contemporary biologist’s perspective,” Zebrafish 5, no. 4 (2008): 243–45.
“Important Biological Objects Come in Pairs”
One could not be a successful scientist: James D. Watson, The Double Helix: A Personal Account of the Discovery of the Structure of DNA (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1981), 13.
It is the molecule that has the glamour: Francis Crick, What Mad Pursuit: A Personal View of Scientific Discovery (New York: Basic Books, 1988), 67.
Science [would be] ruined: Donald W. Braben, Pioneering Research: A Risk Worth Taking (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2004), 85.
Among the early converts: Maurice Wilkins, Maurice Wilkins: The Third Man of the Double Helix: An Autobiography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003).
Ernest Rutherford: Richard Reeves, A Force of Nature: The Frontier Genius of Ernest Rutherford (New York: W. W. Norton, 2008).
“Life . . . is a chemical incident”: Arthur M. Silverstein, Paul Ehrlich’s Receptor Immunology: The Magnificent Obsession (San Diego, CA: Academic, 2002), 2.
Wilkins found an X-ray diffraction machine: Maurice Wilkins, correspondence with Raymond Gosling on the early days of DNA research at King’s College, 1976, Maurice Wilkins Papers, King’s College London Archives.
It was, as one friend of Franklin’s: Letter of June 12, 1985, notes on Rosalind Franklin, Maurice Wilkins Papers, no. ad92d68f-4071-4415-8df2-dcfe041171fd.
the relationship soon froze into frank, glacial hostility: Daniel M. Fox, Marcia Meldrum, and Ira Rezak, Nobel Laureates in Medicine or Physiology: A Biographical Dictionary (New York: Garland, 1990), 575.
She “barks often, doesn’t succeed in biting me”: James D. Watson, The Annotated and Illustrated Double Helix, ed. Alexander Gann and
J. A. Witkowski (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2012), letter to Crick, 151.
“Now she’s trying to drown me”: Brenda Maddox, Rosalind Franklin: The Dark Lady of DNA (New York: HarperCollins, 2002), 164.
Franklin found most of her male colleagues “positively repulsive”: Watson, Annotated and Illustrated Double Helix, letter from Rosalind Franklin to Anne Sayre, March 1, 1952, 67.
It was not just sexism: Crick never believed that Franklin was affected by sexism. Unlike Watson, who eventually wrote a generous recapitulation of Franklin’s work highlighting the adversities that she had faced as a scientist, Crick maintained that Franklin was unaffected by the atmosphere at King’s. Franklin and Crick would eventually become close friends in the late 1950s; Crick and his wife were especially helpful to Franklin during her prolonged illness and in the months preceding her untimely death. Crick’s fondness for Franklin can be found in Crick, What Mad Pursuit, 82–85.
passionate Marie Curie, with her chapped palms: “100 years ago: Marie Curie wins 2nd Nobel Prize,” Scientific American, October 28, 2011, http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/curie-marie-sklodowska-greatest-woman-scientist/.
ethereal Dorothy Hodgkin at Oxford: “Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin—biographical,” Nobelprize.org, http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/chemistry/laureates/1964/hodgkin-bio.html.
an “affable looking housewife”: Athene Donald, “Dorothy Hodgkin and the year of crystallography,” Guardian, January 14, 2014.
ingenious apparatus that bubbled hydrogen: “The DNA riddle: King’s College, London, 1951–1953,” Rosalind Franklin Papers, http://profiles.nlm.nih.gov/ps/retrieve/Narrative/KR/p-nid/187.
J. D. Bernal, the crystallographer: J. D. Bernal, “Dr. Rosalind E. Franklin,” Nature 182 (1958): 154.
“shirttails flying, knees in the air”: Max F. Perutz, I Wish I’d Made You Angry Earlier: Essays on Science, Scientists, and Humanity (Cold Spring Harbor, NY: Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press, 1998), 70.
Wilkins showed little, if any, excitement: Watson Fuller, “For and against the helix,” Maurice Wilkins Papers, no. 00c0a9ed-e951-4761-955c-7490e0474575.
“Before Maurice’s talk”: Watson, Double Helix, 23.
“Maurice was English”: http://profiles.nlm.nih.gov/ps/access/SCBBKH.pdf.
“nothing about the X-ray diffraction”: Watson, Double Helix, 22.
“a complete flop”: Ibid., 18.
“The fact that I was unable”: Ibid., 24.
Watson had moved to Cambridge: Officially, Watson had moved to Cambridge to help Perutz and another scientist, John Kendrew, with their work on a protein called myoglobin. Watson then switched to the study of the structure of a virus called tobacco mosaic virus, or TMV. But he was vastly more interested in DNA and soon abandoned all other projects to focus on DNA. Watson, Annotated and Illustrated Double Helix, 127.
“A youthful arrogance”: Crick, What Mad Pursuit, 64.
“The trouble is, you see, that there is”: Watson, Annotated and Illustrated Double Helix, 107.
Pauling’s seminal paper: L. Pauling, R. B. Corey, and H. R. Branson, “The structure of proteins: Two hydrogen-bonded helical configurations of the polypeptide chain,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 37, no. 4 (1951): 205–11.
“product of common sense”: Watson, Annotated and Illustrated Double Helix, 44.
“like trying to determine the structure of a piano”: http://www.diracdelta.co.uk/science/source/c/r/crick%20francis/source.html#.Vh8XlaJeGKI.
The experimental data would generate the models: Crick, What Mad Pursuit, 100–103. Crick always maintained that Franklin fully understood the importance of model building.
“How dare you interpret my data for me?”: Victor K. McElheny, Watson and DNA: Making a Scientific Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Perseus, 2003), 38.
“Big helix with several chains”: Alistair Moffat, The British: A Genetic Journey (Edinburgh: Berlinn, 2014); and from Rosalind Franklin’s laboratory notebooks, dated 1951.
“Superficially, the X-ray data”: Watson, Annotated and Illustrated Double Helix, 73.
“check it with”: Ibid.
Wilkins, Franklin, and her student, Ray Gosling: Bill Seeds and Bruce Fraser accompanied them on this visit.
As Gosling recalled, “Rosalind let rip”: Watson, Annotated and Illustrated Double Helix, 91.
“His mood”: Ibid., 92.
In the first weeks of January 1953: Linus Pauling and Robert B. Corey, “A proposed structure for the nucleic acids,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 39, no. 2 (1953): 84–97.
“V.Good. Wet Photo”: http://profiles.nlm.nih.gov/ps/access/KRBBJF.pdf.
“important biological objects come in pairs”: Watson, Double Helix, 184.
he would later write defensively: Anne Sayre, Rosalind Franklin & DNA (New York: W. W. Norton, 1975), 152.
“Suddenly I became aware”: Watson, Annotated and Illustrated Double Helix, 207.
“Upon his arrival”: Ibid., 208.
“winged into the Eagle”: Ibid., 209.
“We see it as a rather stubby double helix”: John Sulston and Georgina Ferry, The Common Thread: A Story of Science, Politics, Ethics, and the Human Genome (Washington, DC: Joseph Henry Press, 2002), 3.
Maurice Wilkins came to take a look: Most likely on March 11 or 12, 1953. Crick informed Delbrück of the model on Thursday, March 12. Also see Watson Fuller, “Who said helix?” with related papers, Maurice Wilkins Papers, no. c065700f-b6d9-46cf-902a-b4f8e078338a.
“The model was standing high”: June 13, 1996, Maurice Wilkins Papers.
“I think you’re a couple of old rogues”: Letter from Maurice Wilkins to Francis Crick, March 18, 1953, Wellcome Library, Letter Reference no. 62b87535-040a-448c-9b73-ff3a3767db91. http://wellcomelibrary.org/player/b20047198#?asi=0&ai=0&z=0.1215%2C0.2046%2C0.5569%2C0.3498.
“I like the idea”: Fuller, “Who said helix?” with related papers.
“The positioning of the backbone”: Watson, Annotated and Illustrated Double Helix, 222.
On April 25, 1953: J. D. Watson and F. H. C. Crick, “Molecular structure of nucleic acids: A structure for deoxyribose nucleic acid,” Nature 171 (1953): 737–38.
“the enigma of how the vast amount”: Fuller, “Who said helix?” with related papers.
“That Damned, Elusive Pimpernel”
In the protein molecule: “1957: Francis H. C. Crick (1916–2004) sets out the agenda of molecular biology,” Genome News Network, http://www.genomenewsnetwork.org/resources/timeline/1957_Crick.php.
In 1941: “1941: George W. Beadle (1903–1989) and Edward L. Tatum (1909–1975) show how genes direct the synthesis of enzymes that control metabolic processes,” Genome News Network, http://www.genomenewsnetwork.org/resources/timeline/1941_Beadle_Tatum.php.
a student of Thomas Morgan’s: Edward B. Lewis, “Thomas Hunt Morgan and his legacy,” Nobelprize.org, http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/medicine/laureates/1933/morgan-article.html.
the “action” of a gene: Frank Moore Colby et al., The New International Year Book: A Compendium of the World’s Progress, 1907–1965 (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1908), 786.
“A gene,” Beadle wrote in 1945: George Beadle, “Genetics and metabolism in Neurospora,” Physiological reviews 25, no. 4 (1945): 643–63.
“For over a year”: James D. Watson, Genes, Girls, and Gamow: After the Double Helix (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2002), 31.
“I am playing with complex organic”: http://scarc.library.oregonstate.edu/coll/pauling/dna/corr/sci9.001.43-gamow-lp-19531022-transcript.html.
Gamow called it the RNA Tie Club: Ted Everson, The Gene: A Historical Perspective (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2007), 89–91.
“It always had a rather ethereal existence”: “Francis Crick, George Gamow, and the RNA Tie Club,” Web of Stories. http://www.webofstories.com/play/francis.crick/84.
“Do or die, or don’t try”: Sam Kean, The Violinist’s Thumb: And Other Lost Tales of Love, War, and Genius
, as Written by Our Genetic Code (New York: Little, Brown, 2012).
was required for the translation of DNA into proteins: Arthur Pardee and Monica Riley had also proposed a variant of this idea.
Is he in heaven, is he in hell?: Cynthia Brantley Johnson, The Scarlet Pimpernel (Simon & Schuster, 2004), 124.
“It’s the magnesium”: “Albert Lasker Award for Special Achievement in Medical Science: Sydney Brenner,” Lasker Foundation, http://www.laskerfoundation.org/awards/2000special.htm.
Like DNA, these RNA molecules were built: Two other scientists, Elliot Volkin and Lazarus Astrachan, had proposed an RNA intermediate for genes in 1956. The two seminal papers published by the Brenner/Jacob group and the Watson/Gilbert group in 1961 are: F. Gros et al., “Unstable ribonucleic acid revealed by pulse labeling of Escherichia coli,” Nature 190 (May 13, 1960): 581–85; and S. Brenner, F. Jacob, and M. Meselson, “An unstable intermediate carrying information from genes to ribosomes for protein synthesis,” Nature 190 (May 13, 1960): 576–81.
“It seems likely . . . that the precise sequence”: J. D. Watson and F. H. C. Crick, “Genetical implications of the structure of deoxyribonucleic acid,” Nature 171, no. 4361 (1953): 965.
In 1904, a single image: David P. Steensma, Robert A. Kyle, and Marc A. Shampo, “Walter Clement Noel—first patient described with sickle cell disease,” Mayo Clinic Proceedings 85, no. 10 (2010).
In 1951, working with Harvey Itano: “Key participants: Harvey A. Itano,” It’s in the Blood! A Documentary History of Linus Pauling, Hemoglobin, and Sickle Cell Anemia, http://scarc.library.oregonstate.edu/coll/pauling/blood/people/itano.html.
Regulation, Replication, Recombination
It is absolutely necessary to find the origin: Quoted in Sean Carrol, Brave Genius: A Scientist, a Philosopher, and Their Daring Adventures from the French Resistance to the Nobel Prize (New York: Crown, 2013), 133.
“the properties implicit in genes”: Thomas Hunt Morgan, “The relation of genetics to physiology and medicine,” Scientific Monthly 41, no. 1 (1935): 315.
Jacques Monod, the French biologist: Agnes Ullmann, “Jacques Monod, 1910–1976: His life, his work and his commitments,” Research in Microbiology 161, no. 2 (2010): 68–73.