Double Helix essays

Double Helix essays People Doing Science: The Double Helix (The discovery of DNA's Double Helix) The Double Helix tells the story of the discovery of DNAs structure as seen through the eyes of the author, James D. Watson. The book starts in the fall of 1951 with Watson, an American postdoctoral fellow, arriving at Cavendish Laboratory at Cambridge University. Although, he originally worked on the three-dimensional structure of proteins, Watson gradually turned his attention to the structure of DNA and worked with Francis Crick on cracking DNAs secret structure. In a race to be the first to discover DNAs arrangement, Watson and Crick competed with Englanders Rosy Franklin and Maurice Wilkins, and American Linus Pauling. Each tries different methods to find DNAs structure. Each team tries different structures. Nevertheless, after two year of searching and many incorrect models, Watson and Crick get all of the pieces of the puzzle to fit together. In April of 1953, Watson and Crick went public with their findings in a monumental journal article, which proclaimed DNAs doubl e helix. Watson and Crick won the race. In the Origins of Science, Philip Wilson wrote, When perusing a science textbook, one can easily envision science as a body of knowledge. But more than knowledge, science is a process in that people do science. This means that not only is the outcome of the scientific research important, but it is also important how that result came to be. Like perusing a science textbook, perusing The Double Helix shows how humans do science. By examining interactions among scientists, one can begin to understand how people do science. A major form of the interactions between the key players in The Double Helix was through competition. Petrified that others would steal her work, Rosy kept her research from everyone. She saw solving...