Decoding Watson on PBS

I would like to thank John Kwok for alerting me to this new PBS documentary about James Watson, the controversial co-discoverer of DNA structure. I was tagged in a post about it on Facebook by John who saw Professor Ken Miller of Brown University share a link to the film. I agree wholeheartedly with Dr. Miller's assessment of the documentary. It is unafraid in confronting the racism and sexism of Watson while allowing the story of the discovery of the double helix to shine.

I must add one note. Though the story of discovery is certainly abbreviated, I think it worth mentioning one character who is left out in this telling.  Jerry Donohue, an organic chemist from Wisconsin of whom few have ever heard. Donohue provided a crucial course correction right before Watson put the puzzle together (The Double Helix pg. 120).  Watson had been using cardboard models of the four nitrogenous bases that constitute DNA. He made these flat cut-outs based the structures published in The Biochemistry of Nucleic Acids by J. N. Davidson.  Watson was using the cardboard models to try and conjure how the bases might fit together to form a helix (which he knew must be the structure from Rosalind Franklin's famous photograph 51.) However, these cardboard models were misshapen. Homologous oxygen atoms poking out from the thymine and guanine models were in the enol (O-H) rather than the keto (=O)  form.  Jerry Donohue pointed this out and only then could Watson make the key observation that adenine pairs with thymine just as guanine pairs with cytosine. It was as though Donohue passed him the ball on the one-yard line!

When I read Watson's The Double Helix for the first time last year I was startled to learn about Jerry Donohue and hope he is also remembered for this serendipitous correction!

Happy Birthday Tesla!

Nikola Tesla sculpture located at Queen Victoria Park near Niagara falls, unveiled on July 9, 2006. Tesla stands atop an AC motor, one of the 700 inventions he patented. The monument is the work of Canadian sculptor Les Dryzdale.

Nikola Tesla ushered in the age of alternating current, radio, and television with fanfare. Though his showmanship as a scientist often made skeptics of his colleagues his ideas were eons ahead of their time and are only now receiving the kind of consideration and awe they deserve.

When presenting his new concepts he insisted one of his coils (right) be spouting off the visual manifestations of electricity, popping and fizzling so loudly as to make his words inaudible. If his contemporaries could have heard his voice they would see he had an infectious obsession with progress and the idea that the hidden powers of electricity and magnetism could be unlocked to allow humanity to live more easily. 


He had a vision for free and equitable POWER (in all philosophical and practical definitions of the word) for every man woman and child on earth. His efforts to realize this were thwarted by J. P. Morgan and other financial backers who caught wind of Tesla's scheme to deliver free electricity wirelessly to the public through Tesla's giant telecommunications tower at Wardenclyffe on Long Island. There was no profit to be made by giving people what the needed freely. But presently, as the internet gains depth and gravity, this vision is being pieced together slowly and perhaps one day will be complete. The ghost of Nikola Tesla breathes life into the very medium in which I pass these keystrokes along. Happy Birthday Nikola!

 If you want to laugh for the rest of the day watch this summary of Tesla's life.

Drunk History vol. 6 w/ John C. Reilly & Crispin Glover from Drunk History

Read more about Tesla and enrapturing life story here here and here