Writing assignment 6 - Professor Rinehart Kim Summary from the movie : \"The Race for the Double Helix\" PDF

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Professor Rinehart Kim
Summary from the movie : "The Race for the Double Helix"
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3/8/19 Writing Assignment 6 I honestly did not know much about James Watson or Francis Crick before watching the movie The Race for the Double Helix. I knew they were responsible for finding the double helix structure of DNA, but not much more than that. I didn’t know that Watson was American, and Crick was European, and I didn’t know that they had built a model that was incorrect before building the double helix model. The movie starts with Watson trying to work with Maurice Wilkins on DNA, but he can’t, so he ends up going to Cambridge where he meets Crick. In the beginning of the movie it goes back and forth from the perspectives of Watson and Crick to the perspective of Rosalind Franklin. It is not until over halfway through part one where the two stories “collide”, and Watson meets Franklin. Franklin has just moved to England from Paris, and she is working in Maurice Wilkins’ lab to perform X-ray crystallography on DNA samples. Watson and Crick shared the same interest in genes and DNA and they both wanted to solve the structure. They start formulating ideas before doing much research. While performing X-ray crystallography, Franklin separates DNA into two forms, A form and B form. The A form pictures were much clearer than the B form pictures, so she focused on A form first. An issue arose when she found that the A form was not a helical shape. This contradicted what Wilkins, and many other scientists had originally thought. When Watson finally meets Franklin, he attends one of her presentations and uses her research to build his first DNA model with Crick. Watson misheard some of Franklin’s notes and this causes their model to be far from correct. Part one ends with Crick being told not to focus on DNA any more. In part two Franklin and Wilkins become frustrated with each other because Franklin is adamant on doing thorough research before making any predictions on structure, and Wilkins wants to start thinking about the structure. Wilkins also feels like Franklin is taking his work away from him. Watson and Crick, still struggling with how the DNA structure is held together, continue to work. Crick’s initial thoughts were that it was held together by electrical charges, and the phosphates were on the inside. Since Watson can’t get his hands on any of Franklin’s data, he tries to get his own pictures of DNA. Crick has just finished researching protein and hemoglobin structure and he taught Watson how to read X-ray crystallography pictures. They turn their focus to the bases as the form of attraction after Watson recalls something he read in one of Erwin Chargaff’s papers. They get to meet Chargaff and Crick proposes that the same bases were bonded to each other (A to A, G to G, etc.) but Chargaff tells him that purines bond to pyrimidines and tells him about the ratios of adenine being equal to thymine and guanine being equal to cytosine. Franklin has already taken the famous photo 51 of B form, but she is still focusing on A form. Watson and Crick are starting to feel the pressure of being the first to discover the DNA structure when a famous scientist, Linus Pauling, builds his first DNA model. They know that it is just a matter of time before Pauling gets it right. Watson goes to talk to Wilkins and tells them about their sense of urgency and that’s where he first sees franklin’s photo 51. He remembers what Crick had showed him about reading X-ray crystallography pictures and he sees that photo is exactly like the double helix Crick had drawn for him. He goes back to Cambridge and draws crick photo 51 and Crick determines that DNA is double stranded with a helical shape, and each turn is 34 angstroms. They are still held back by the phosphate location and base attraction. They move the phosphates to the outside and Watson discovers how A bonds to T and how G bonds to C with hydrogen bonds. With all this information they successfully build the DNA structure. When Franklin sees the structure, she is asked if she is mad that her research was used to find the structure. She says that all the frustration and anger goes away when the final discovery is made, and the only thing left is the beauty of the truth no matter who discovers it. Watson and Crick tell Wilkins that he can be a part of their publication if he wants to since the research came from his lab. Wilkins says that this success was theirs and that he would publish separately. Franklin’s death is not included in the movie, but a note is made at the end that she died of cancer five years after the discovery was made. This movie goes beyond just Watson and Crick. I didn’t know how much research they used from other sources to build their model. It also shows Franklin’s struggle as a woman in the science field. It shows how a log of the men disrespect her and how strong she was to continue her work

in the sciences. I did not know much about Rosalind Franklin and I didn’t know anything about Maurice Wilkins before watching this movie, but after watching it I now know more about everyone involved with the discovery of the double helix and how it came to be....