Stats for nerds
2recommend
7mentions
3people
2019–2025years
71% recommend14% neutral14% critical
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- The best I've read is "The Eighth Day Of Creation" (which is amazing book beyond the part that covers the elucidation of the structure of DNA). He references multiple internal data sources that establish the process by which Gosling's photo made it to Watson and Crick. Of all the accounts I've read, it seems to be the most factual. I think it's also worth reading Watson's account ("The Double Helix") and the book that originally brought the most attention to the treatment of Franklin ("Rosalind Franklin: The Dark Lady of DNA")
I believe this article has some updated results: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/25/science/rosalind-franklin... and it appears there was an earlier book before Dark Lady, referenced here: https://www.nytimes.com/1975/09/21/archives/rosalind-frankli...
- Only recent in relation to the classics, but I really enjoyed the following (the years are approximate). There are others, but I've listed these ones specifically because those others have already been recommended elsewhere in the thread whereas these may get missed.
- Adam Roberts: New Model Army (2010?)
- Hiroshi Sakurazaka: All You Need is Kill (2005?)
- Mike Resnick: The Dark Lady (2015?)
- KC Alexander: Necrotech (2015?)
- Gary Gibson: Stealing Light, Nova War, and Empire of Light (2013?)
- Linda Nagata: The Last Good Man (2015?)
- The usual suspects have been named, so here's some less obvious ones.
As series:
- Hawk and Fisher (Simon R Green) - excellent fantasy action
- Saga of the Exiles (Julian May) - huge scope
- Sinless (KC Alexander) - possibly too filthy
As films:
- Corvis Rebaine (Ari Marmell) - series, similar to Abercrombie
- Halcyon Drift (Brian Stableford) - old classic
- The Dark Lady (Mike Resnick) - interspecies mystery
- The discovery of DNA was done by Friedrich Meischer, a brilliant Swiss biologist. At the time, nobody knew what the nuclein he purified did (and, the results were considered so surprising that his own thesis advisor redid all the experiments manually before letting the data be published).
What you are referring to is the use of Rosalind Franklin's X-ray fibre diffraction images by Watson and Crick to elucidate the 3D structure of DNA, and, depending on the accounts you read, whether she got due credit is arguable. She did publish in the same Nature journal issue as W&C (https://www.nature.com/articles/171740a0.pdf), she got credit for the photos (see the acknowledgements in the W&C paper, http://www.nature.com/genomics/human/watson-crick/), and she was dead by the time the Nobel Prize decision was made (so she could not have received the prize).
I understand many feel very strongly that she was cheated, and while I do believe she was definitely slighted and not given enough credit, the underlying story is fairly complicated. I recommend reading both Dark Lady and Eighth Day of Creation and then forming your own opinion. personally I thought her personal diaries, which she willed to Aaron Klug and were used in the writing of Eighth Day, were really illuminating.
- If you want to learn more about Rosalind Franklin, I recommend reading three books: Watson's book on the discovery of the structure of DNA (with a heavy prior: he's a colossal asshole who wrote the book to give him the best light), Maddox's biography (The Dark Lady of DNA), and The Eighth Day of Creation by Horace Judson.
The third book is the most important because Franklin gave her scientific notes to her friend Aaron Klug and Judson did some very careful sleuthing to extract what Franklin did and how Watson & Crick got access to, and reduced her role in, the data that led them to deduce the three dimensional structure of DNA. In an extraordinary example of parallel reconstruction, he demonstrated that Franklin actually made all her data and speculations available in a departmental publication and a talk, addressing the controversy about how W&C got access to her data, and when.
the book is amazing all-around. It's a tough read (I make it through maybe a page or two a day before having to put it down) but very well researched via first-person interviews.
- Actually, phosphates on the outside were actually part of Furberg's model from '52 - see Model I in http://actachemscand.org/pdf/acta_vol_06_p0634-0640.pdf which W&C specifically mention in their paper.
I personally agree about Franklin and the Nobel- I think most people just read Dark Lady and believe its conclusion. I always recommend that people read Eighth Day of Creation, which presents a very compelling alternate view based on primary data.
