131–140 of 303 posts
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Because there are lots of people who do great things who aren't assholes. We as a society should prioritize valourzing the non-assholes who do great things over the assholes who do great things.
why?
The less assholes you have to deal with in your day to day affairs the better off you are.
Wasn't his partner Crick high on LSD when he discovered the double-helix structure of DNA?
You might be thinking of Kary Mullis, who supposedly came up with PCR while riding his motorcycle on LSD.
I need to re-read his book
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>an accomplished scientist getting sidetracked with baseless medical quackery I would still take that over being an unaccomplished nobody getting sidetracked with baseless medical quackery.
Arguably it is worse. Society tends to transfer skills/talent/achievement/luck in one field and assume those attributes hold good in all fields because they were successful in one area, even if there is no justification, so their beliefs tend to carry lot more weight and influence than the average joe and hold the field back. Talented people when sidetracked may no longer be as effective contributors, for example Ein…
>diminished contributions in later part of his life
Whew, that's a wild one.
I've always wanted to see how the structure maps to x-ray diffraction pattern in Photograph 51. Pretty neat!
I want to use this opportunity to shill possibly the best history of science ever written: The Eighth Day of Creation [1], which describes the history of structural biology, including Watson’s various contributions. He comes across as a precocious asshole, not without talent but with a stronger eye towards self-advancement. [1] https://www.cshlpress.com/default.tpl?cart=17625586661954464...
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> the guy was into eugenics So are you (probably). Do you think incest should be legalized? > thought some races are smarter than others What other conclusion can you reasonably come to based on the available data?
A biologist can correct me if I'm wrong, but I understand "race" in humans to be little different than, say, hair-color. Perhaps there's data showing that brunettes are smarter than blondes? EDIT: Never mind, user krapp's comment is what I was reaching for, "Race isn't biological, it's a social and political construct."
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In fact, it was a photograph she took 8 months earlier, and she didn't realize its significance or implication. If useful data is shelved, is it still useful? For Watson, the image corroborated the double-helix theory and caused them to focus exclusively on that (instead of triple or single). The photograph itself did not deliver a DNA model.
All these excuses for a blatant case of cheating... > she didn't realize its significance or implication. That does not change the fact that they plagiarized and cheated. They could have collaborated with her and/or credited her
The man just died and it's as if you're trying to pry the Nobel Prize from him.
Franklin didn't know what she had. If she did, she would have been working on it.
In a moment of supreme clarity, the universe revealed itself. Watson and Crick knew immediately the photo would cut down their search space from alternative structures. They still had work to do, because the Angstrom length data is not a model by itself. It just constrained the geometry for the bonds and electrochemistry.
Wasn't his partner Crick high on LSD when he discovered the double-helix structure of DNA?
There wasn't ever a "moment" when they "discovered" the structure of DNA. The closest thing is Franklin's Photograph 51 which took about 100 hours to compile and then took another year to do all the calculations to confirm the position of each atom. Watson and Crick (without the consent of Franklin) saw this Photograph, did some quick analysis, and came up with a couple of models that could match Franklin's photograp…
In any case, while Franklin certainly didn't get along with Watson, she was close friends with Crick and his wife Odile up to her death and in fact lived with the Cricks when she was undergoing treatment for her cancer [2]. This would be hard to square with the idea that she thought Crick had "stolen" "her" data,
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raymond_Gosling [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_Mad_Pursuit
Years ago I had the pleasure of sitting in on one of his talks on longevity. Other than the casual racism and sexism (Watson is the only person in my entire life I've seen say racist things about Irish people), he made a big comment on Linus Pauling's obsession towards the end of his life regarding Vitamin C consumption. The main idea is that primates such as humans and chimps lost the ability to synthesize vitamin C…
Linus Pauling's obsession with Vitamin C is a famous case of an accomplished scientist getting sidetracked with baseless medical quackery. Even during his lifetime there were clinical trials including by the Mayo Clinic that failed to support his claims, but he rejected them all because he was convinced he was right and they were wrong. Linus Pauling was also famously in favor of eugenics directed at African American…
Dor Yeshorim is Hebrew for "upright generation" (a reference to a Psalm), and I always thought that was a pretty eugenics-y sounding name. Of course attempting to influence which people have children with which other people in order to avoid genetic problems is a type of eugenics, just one that seems reasonable in light of the fact that it does seem to have greatly reduced the prevalence of Tay-Sachs sufferers.