ROSALIND FRANKLIN'S QUIET PERFORMANCE

Is the writing of science an aspect of performance writing, or is it the performance of the research that leads to the writing? Whichever it is, the collating of separate elements of scientific research into a single thesis can perform beyond expectation. There is something of the prima donna in scientists. A scientific controversy over who did what when, can generate wonderful drama, and the producing of the molecular structure of DNA abounds with such diva performers.

The "Molecular structure of Nucleic Acids: A Structure for Deoxyribose Nucleic Acid" was an article published by James D. Watson and Francis Crick in the scientific journal Nature in its 171st volume on pages 737–738 (dated 25^th April 1953). It was the first publication which described Rosalind Franklin’s discovery of the double helix structure of DNA. This discovery had a major impact on biology, particularly in the field of genetics.

Crick

Watson and Crick based their molecular model of the DNA double helix on data that had been collected by researchers in several other laboratories. Watson and Crick were the first to put together all of the scattered fragments of information that were required to produce a successful molecular model of DNA.

Watson

Wilkins

Much of the data that were used by Crick and Watson came from unpublished work by Maurice Wilkins, Rosalind Franklin, A.R. Stokes and H.R. Wilson at Kings College London and University of London. Key data from Wilkins, Stokes, and Wilson, and, separately, by Franklin and Raymond Gosling, were published in two separate additional articles in the same issue of Nature with the article by Watson and Crick. The article by Watson and Crick did acknowledge that they had been "stimulated" by experimental results from the King's College researchers, and a similar acknowledgment was published by M. H. F. Wilkins, A.R. Stokes, and H. R. Wilson in the following three-page article.

Franklin

Crick, Watson and Wilkins were awarded collectively the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 1962. Sadly, Rosalind Franklin, the person, whose discovery of the double helix that led to the prize and less of a seeker of the limelight, died of cancer on the 16^th April 1958, age 37. I regret that I did not mention her in the blog on that day. It was not until 1998, forty years after her death, that the National Portrait Gallery added her portrait next to those of Crick, Watson and Wilkins

LA MARSEILLAISE

On quite another note, on the 25^th April 1792, the mayor of Strasbourg requested his guest Rouget de Lisle compose a song "that will rally our soldiers from all over to defend their homeland that is under threat". That evening, Rouget de Lisle wrote Chant de guerre pour l'Armée du Rhin and dedicated the song to marshal Nicolas Luckner, a Bavarian in French service from Cham, Germany. The melody soon became the rallying call to the French Revolution and was adopted as La Marseillaise after the melody was first sung on the streets by volunteers (fédérés in French) from Marseille by the end of May.

Rouget de Lisle, composer of the Marseillaise,

sings it for the first time at the home of Dietrich,

Mayor of Strasbourg (Musée historique de

Strasbourg, published 1849, artist Isidore Pils)