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Views | Duration | ||
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31. The two areas of biology I chose to work in | 841 | 01:57 | |
32. Social interactions among scientists | 934 | 03:06 | |
33. Molecular biology in the late 1940s | 1172 | 03:08 | |
34. The road to Cambridge | 1218 | 02:16 | |
35. James Watson - the bald American | 2064 | 01:25 | |
36. James Watson - precocious and fun | 1718 | 01:51 | |
37. Treating our research results with caution | 1239 | 00:55 | |
38. The triplet code | 1 | 1244 | 00:44 |
39. The difficulties solving scientific problems | 1245 | 01:06 | |
40. The emotional ups and downs of scientific research | 1355 | 01:10 |
It’s very difficult to remember what you thought at the time but it so happened that my son was away at a boarding school then, he must have been a… well, I can work out how… how old he was, he would be about 13, 12 perhaps, and so I wrote him a letter saying I thought… think we’ve got something important. So, we did know… we did think it was going to be important but we… there was a reservation… you know, did we really have it right? And when we saw the… the data from the experimentalists in King’s College, London - Rosalind Franklin, Maurice Wilkins, for example - we were more encouraged because it fitted very well with what we’d proposed. So, that was the first step but it then took quite some time. And then, of course, what the idea was the replication mechanism, and the replication mechanism had to be established by quite different types of experiments which… which weren’t done until the late ’50s, so… so it did… it did take some time.
The late Francis Crick, one of Britain's most famous scientists, won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1962. He is best known for his discovery, jointly with James Watson and Maurice Wilkins, of the double helix structure of DNA, though he also made important contributions in understanding the genetic code and was exploring the basis of consciousness in the years leading up to his death in 2004.
Title: Treating our research results with caution
Listeners: Christopher Sykes
Christopher Sykes is an independent documentary producer who has made a number of films about science and scientists for BBC TV, Channel Four, and PBS.
Tags: King’s College in London, Rosalind Franklin, Maurice Wilkins
Duration: 55 seconds
Date story recorded: 1993
Date story went live: 24 January 2008