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Videos
The DNA Story - 1973
 Maurice Wilkins
Author: Maurice Wilkins
Length: 2:12
 Watch using AVI Size: 9.7MB
Transcript:
Narrator: Maurice Wilkins had worked as a physicist on the atom bomb during the war, and had turned in disgust on what he
felt was the way science had been misapplied, to biology. With an interest in the gene kindled by reading a little book called
WHAT IS LIFE, in which the theoretical physicist Erwin Schrodinger had speculated that the gene consists of a 3 dimensional
arrangement of atoms, he found himself at the Kings College, London, using x-ray diffraction to study the structure of DNA.
Wilkins: One of the reasons I think we got better diffraction results than Astbury, one of the main reasons, was that we had
better DNA made by SIGNER in Switzerland. This sort of shows a basic principle here in scientific advance; that one was very
dependent on all the essential work that was done by chemists and biochemists. The x-ray and model building work was a little
sort of... pinnacle, put on top of this wide and essential base. Also an important factor was that I think we had a feeling
of how to treat the molecule right; that, as BONALID found with protein crystals, you needed to keep them in the aqueous environment.
We also sort of lined the molecules up, especially parallel in fibers. I was in Naples actually, because I wanted to get DNA
in real cells - in the chromosomes, in the sperm heads of various creatures out of the Bay of Naples. At that time one had
very little idea about whether the DNA which chemists produced bore any resemblance to the DNA in a chromosome in a cell.
In fact, the x-ray diffraction results gave good evidence that it did.
| Title: |
Maurice Wilkins discussing the biochemist role in DNA discovery |
| Creator: |
VSM Productions |
| Publisher: |
New York; John Wiley, 1973 |
| Date: |
1973-00-00 |
| Subject: |
Wilkins, Maurice
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| Description: |
Maurice Wilkins discusses some of the reasons why he believed his research group got better diffraction results during their
research. <br> Length: 132 secs.<br> Size: 9.7 MB
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| Type: |
Video |
| Format: |
video/avi |
| Language: |
en |
| Identifier: |
dnastory03.avi |
| Source: |
Captured from video cassette tape using ATI AIW Radeon 8500DV video capture card. |
| Rights: |
http://osulibrary.orst.edu/specialcollections/coll/pauling/dna/copyright.html |
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