Should a thief be rewarded for their behaviour?

It took an ex-physicist and a former ornithology student — along with some unwitting help from a competitor — to crack the secret of life...



(click on link to read the post...)


I have missed blogging - I have been doing it on and off for the past 4 years or so. I don't know why I stopped - just ran out of things to say. I think uni drains my creativeness - you can't really be creative in science - not while still in the learning process anyway.I have decided to do themed posts....

So most days I will try and post something - a little post - nothing much but themed..

Here is what I propose (if you can think of other things let me know)

M is for Music Monday's
T is for Trivia Tuesday's
W is for Written Word Wednesday's
T is for Silent T Thursday's
F is for Fashion Friday's
S is for Sexy Science Saturday's and Sunday's


So obviously I am hoping to post something about each of these topics during the week. I have left Thursdays open as either a non post day or possibly they could be about anything if I so chose to post...

Is this going to be possible - who knows... Will I keep doing it - again who knows.. I do know that I will most likely be posting these posts in all of my blogs - this one... My livejournal one (hello TV.net and RoTV) and then Myspace...


Questions? Comments? Thoughts??

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So here's a little post on science to keep you entertained until I have this up and running...



I want to tell you a little about one of my Scientific Hero's. Rosalind Franklin. She helped discover the structure of DNA (the double helix - everyone remember's the geeks going to the prom in Never Been Kissed).

Why is she one of my hero's - she is a female scientist - a very successful one in the 1950's - working in London - and beating those boy's at their own game!!!

Now when I say helped discover - really I mean it was mainly her. She worked out through x-ray crystallography (The most widely used (and most accurate) method of obtaining structures, X-ray crystallography involves expressing highly purified protein samples, crystallizing these, and then performing X-ray diffraction of the protein to elucidate crystal structure). That the structure was a helix structure and it was 2 strands not 3 as previously thought. She also worked out that sugar-phosphate backbone was on the outside of the molecule not the inside as previously thought. The only thing she couldn't work out was how the bases paired on the inside of the helix....

This was left for Francis Crick and James Watson to discover.

Maurice Wilkins was Franklins collegue at King's College in London where they worked together in John Randall's lab. He and Franklin didn't get on - what with this being the 1950's and Franklin being a female (and most probably smarter than him). Wilkins decides to take Franklin's UNPUBLISHED work to Crick and Watson - without Franklin OR her boss Randall's permission or even knowledge.

This helped them put 2 and 2 together. Their work was published in the same volume of science journal Nature (April, 1953) as Franklin's work. In all accounts Franklin never knew they had had access to her work. Five years later Franklin was dead (at age 37 from cancer).

Crick, Watson and Wilkins were awarded the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 1962 (as this award is not given post-humously Franklin yet again misses out).

Now I can understand why Crick and Watson received this award, I know they did say that their success would never have been possible without seeing Franklin's work.

I can even sort of understand why they don't give this award post-humously.