Box 3. Frustrated Contributors to DNA Structure

Jerry Donohue, the chemist who had insisted that James Watson try modeling DNA with the keto form of nitrogenous bases, expressed to historian Horace Judson his frustration at not being sufficiently acknowledged. "Let's face it," Donohue wrote, "if the fates hadn't ordained that I share an office with Watson and [Francis] Crick in the Cavendish [Laboratory] in 1952­3, they'd still be puttering around trying to pair 'like-with-like' enol forms of the bases."¹⁴ Erwin Chargaff similarly felt insufficiently acknowledged for discovering that the DNA bases guanine and cytosine (and likewise adenine and thymine) are present in approximately equal amounts.

Maurice Wilkins was frustrated because he, understandably, had expected to be collaborating with Watson and Crick. In 1951, Rosalind Franklin joined the Medical Research Council unit at King's College, London. At that time, Wilkins lacked her years of experimental diffraction experience; like most of his MRC colleagues at the King's biophysics unit, he was an accomplished scientist struggling to apply his prior experience in physics to biological problems. As a result, other MRC units jokingly called the biophysics unit "Randall's Circus," after director John Randall. Wilkins acknowledged the nature of Randall's unit when he said of Franklin, "We were amateurs, but she was a professional."

Wilkins, though, learned quickly and acquired some valuable collaborators. By early 1953, approximately eight months after Franklin recorded her famous photograph #51, he and Herbert Wilson were able to use a variety of DNA sources to obtain x-ray photographs sufficiently detailed for structural studies.¹⁵ Later, Wilkins designed a higher-resolution x-ray camera that enabled his team to take diffraction photographs that helped to confirm and refine the Watson and Crick structure. Wilkins had initiated DNA structural studies at King's and, in 1950 with Raymond Gosling, had taken the best DNA photograph to date--one that showed a high degree of crystallinity and thus implied that DNA structure could be solved by x-ray diffraction. Wilkins had recognized DNA's genetic importance long before Crick, obtained high-quality DNA from Rudolf Signer, and supported the hiring of experienced x-ray diffraction expert Rosalind Franklin. Wilkins is well respected by the King's staff that I interviewed and his contributions were deemed worthy of a Nobel Prize.

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© 2003 American Institute of Physics