The Twisted Road to the Double Helix

[Guest guest]

Several journals and newspapers recently have reviewed the following book

which reveals that , Crick and Wilkins, who received the Nobel Prize

for " unravelling the mysteries of the genetic code " , indulged in some rather

underhand and unprofessional behaviour in which they " borrowed " extensively

from the work of a bright young woman scientist by the name of lind

lin.

The following review was published in the Scientific American:

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The Twisted Road to the Double Helix

lind lin's stunningly clear x-ray photographs elucidated the

structure of DNA, but her contribution was ignored at the time

By Dean H. Hamer

The aphorism " history is always written by the victors " is as true for

science as for geopolitics. Certainly it was the case for the discovery in

1953 of the double helical structure of DNA, the most important discovery in

20th-century biology. The victors were and Francis Crick, who

together with Maurice Wilkins shared the 1962 Nobel Prize for crossing the

finish line first. The loser was lind lin, who produced the x-ray

data that most strongly supported the structure but was not properly

acknowledged for her contributions.

According to 's best-selling 1968 account of the great race, The Double

Helix, lin was not even a contender, much less a major contributor. He

painted her as a mere assistant to Wilkins who " had to go or be put in her

place " because she had the audacity to think she might be able to work on DNA

on her own. Worse yet, she " did not emphasize her feminine qualities, "

lamented , who refers to her only as " Rosy. " " The thought could not be

avoided, " he concluded, " that the best home for a feminist was in another

person's lab. "

lin never had a chance to respond; she died of ovarian cancer in 1958.

Her good friend Anne Sayre did offer a rebuttal in lind lin and DNA,

but that biography is too polemical and pedantic to be either persuasive or a

good read.

Now, just in time for the 50th anniversary of the double helix, noted British

biographer Maddox has produced a more balanced, nuanced and informed

version of the tale. lind lin: The Dark Lady of DNA is neither a

paean to lin nor a condemnation of her competitors. It's simply the

story of a scientist's life as gleaned from extensive correspondence,

published and unpublished manuscripts, laboratory notebooks, and interviews

with many of the protagonists.

It was an interesting life. lin, the daughter of a prominent Jewish

family, was an " alarmingly clever " girl who spent her free time doing

arithmetic for pleasure. She was educated at a series of academically

rigorous schools culminating in the University of Cambridge, where, despite

the fact that women were still excluded from receiving an undergraduate

degree, she managed a Ph.D. in physical chemistry and developed the

experimental style that was to characterize all her subsequent work-- an

approach that was meticulous, albeit sometimes overly cautious.

Then it was off to Paris, where she applied the new techniques of x-ray

diffraction to the structure of coal. In France, lin bloomed both as a

scientist, authoring numerous independent publications, and as a young woman

free from the constraints of family and stuffy British society. It was a

happy and productive period, as were her final years at Birkbeck College in

London, where she collaborated with Klug on the structure of the

tobacco mosaic virus.

Alas, the central and most important two years of her career were spent in

the far less hospitable environment of the biophysics unit at King's College

London. There she immediately locked horns with Wilkins over who would get to

study the structure of DNA-- a subject that had been largely ignored during

World War II, with its emphasis on more practical matters, but was

increasingly regarded as the problem in structural biology. Wilkins, who had

been researching the matter for years, had seniority but little insight or

good data. It was lin, a newcomer to biology, who made the critical

observation that DNA exists in two distinct forms, A and B, and produced the

sharpest pictures of both. They reached a compromise that lin would work

on the A form and Wilkins on the B and went their separate ways.

Or so lin thought. In fact, Wilkins, in a weekend visit to Cambridge,

spilled the King's beans to and Crick, who soon thereafter began the

model building. Although their approach was less meticulous than lin's,

it was also far quicker. A few months later it was 's turn to visit

London, where Wilkins showed him lin's startlingly clear x-ray

photograph of the B form. On the train back to Cambridge, drew the

pattern from memory on the margin of his newspaper. Yet just two months

later, in their historic letter to Nature, he and Crick claimed, " We were not

aware of the details of the results presented [in accompanying papers from

lin's and Wilkins's groups] ... when we devised our structure. "

How did and Crick, with the complicity of Wilkins, get away with so

brazenly heisting " Rosy's " data? Maddox offers several theories. The most

obvious is lin's position as a female researcher at an institution where

women were still not allowed to set foot in the senior common room. There was

also the matter of anti-Semitism. lin's family may have anglicized their

name, but her uncle was the first High Commissioner of Palestine, and she was

active in Jewish relief groups. She felt isolated, even ostracized, in a

school where theology was the largest department and " there were swirling

cassocks and dog collars everywhere. "

We'll probably never know the full story, but Maddox's book shines new light

on one of the key characters in the tale of the double helix. lind

lin may not have had the intuition of some of her competitors, but what

she did possess was equally important: integrity....

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Dr Mel C Siff

Denver, USA

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Supertraining/