Author: medkth

Legumes and Linguistics…a New Translation of a Landmark in Biology

The title may not set pulses racing…but don’t be fooled. Alongside ‘On the Origin of Species’ by Charles Darwin in 1859 and the publication of the structure of DNA by James Watson and Francis Crick in 1953, ‘Experiments on Plant Hybrids’ by Gregor Mendel must rank as one of the biggest landmarks in the history of biology. Open any textbook of biology today and you’ll see Mendel hailed as the founding father of modern genetics for the work that he did in his monastery garden on peas. And as explained in ‘Mendel’s Martyrs’, his status as the discoverer of the gene was also enough to land Soviet scientists who supported his work in prison during the Cold War years.

But what was Mendel really up to with those peas? Professor Staffan Mueller-Wille and I are delighted that thanks to the support of the British Society for the History of Science we were able to produce a new translation of Mendel’s work and that this has now been published as a book by Masaryk University Press with forewords by historian Professor Patricia Fara and Nobel laureate Professor Sir Paul Nurse.

A Father and Son Whose X-ray Vision Brought Them a Nobel Prize

Just over a century after they were awarded the Nobel Prize, physicist William Bragg and his son Lawrence have been honoured by the University of Leeds with a new public work of art. ‘The Worlds of If’ is a sculpture by artist Sara Barker which explores the Braggs’ ground breaking discovery of X-ray crystallography, a tool that has since earned 28 Nobel Prizes and helped solve the structure of DNA… hear me explain more at https://soundcloud.com/universityofleeds/dr-kersten-hall-talks-about-the-braggs-the-most-extraordinary-partnership-in-science

https://www.yorkshirepost.co.uk/education/bragging-rights-leeds-university-unveils-tribute-father-dna-2955870

Royal Mint Marks DNA Clue…the Road Not Taken…

It may look as if it should be hanging in a gallery of Modern Art, but ‘Photo 51’ taken by the scientists Rosalind Franklin and her PhD student Raymond Gosling in 1952 has been called ‘one of the most important photographs in the world’ and in recognition of its importance, the Royal Mint have announced the release of a commemorative 5op coin in honour of Franklin which depicts the famous image.

The image shows the pattern made when X-rays are scattered by DNA and when scientist James Watson first saw the striking arrangement of black spots in the form of a cross at the centre of the image, he said that his mouth fell open and his pulse began to race.

Watson knew that the cross-shaped pattern gave him a vital clue to solving the structure of DNA – hence his racing pulse. But while Franklin’s image was a crucial clue, neither she nor Watson were the first to have seen this striking pattern – for a year earlier, someone else had already taken an identical image.

Working at the University of Leeds, William Astbury and Florence Bell had pioneered the X-ray methods that Franklin used to take ‘Photo 51’. Why then, when Astbury and his colleague Elwyn Beighton obtained an identical image in 1951 (shown above), a year before Franklin, was it simply filed away to lie undiscovered for another forty years? And how differently might history have unfolded had Astbury shown this photo to his friend the scientist Linus Pauling when he visited Astbury at his home in Headingley in 1952?…The full story of this intriguing and unknown episode in the story of DNA is told in ‘The Man in the Monkeynut Coat’…