'Lost' Letters Reveal Twists

[Galactic]

Here's something you guys can read about lost letters that reveal the twists in double helix.

Jeremy Hsu

LiveScience Senior Writer

LiveScience.com jeremy Hsu

livescience Senior Writer

livescience.com – Wed Sep 29, 3:25 pm ET

Rediscovered letters and postcards highlight the fierce competition among scientists who discovered DNA's famous double-helix structure and unraveled the genetic code.

Francis Crick and James D. Watson shared a 1962 Nobel Prize with Maurice Wilkins for their work on revealing the structure of the DNA molecule that encodes instructions for the development and function of living beings. But formerly lost letters kept by Crick add more color to the well-known rivalries between Wilkins and the Crick-Watson duo.

"The [letters] give us much more flavor and examples illuminating the characters and the relations between them," said study researcher Alexander Gann, editorial director at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press in New York. "They're consistent with what we already believed, but they add important details."

A fourth researcher credited with initial DNA work, Rosalind Franklin, died of cancer in 1958 and was never nominated for a Nobel Prize. She and her male colleagues did not get along despite their professional collaboration, as seen in some rather blunt messages contained within the new material.

"I hope the smoke of witchcraft will soon be getting out of our eyes," Wilkins wrote to Crick and Watson in 1953, as Franklin prepared to leave Wilkins' lab for Birbeck College in London.

Nine boxes of Crick's material turned up mixed in with the correspondence of a colleague, Sydney Brenner, who had donated his personal documents to Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Library in New York. Researchers knew that much of Crick's earlier correspondence had been lost, but no one suspected it would emerge in Brenner's files. [images of letters from 1955 and 1980]

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http://news.yahoo.com/s/livescience/20100929/sc_livescience/lostlettersrevealtwistsindiscoveryofdoublehelix