IES El Escorial

November 15, 2018

THE BRAINS BEHIND

MOLECULAR GENETICS
FRANCIS CRICK
• Francis Harry Compton Crick was born on June 8,
1916 at Northampton, England.
• He was educated at Northampton Grammar School
and Mill School in London, before studying physics at
the University College, also in London.
• He pursued a scholarly life, as he went to continue
his studies, working together with some of the
prominent figures in the field of MolecularBiology,
such as William Cochran, Vladimir Vand, Sydney
Brenner, and James Watson.
FRANCIS
CRICK • The discovery in 1953 of the double helix, the twisted-ladder
structure of deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA), by James Watson
and Francis Crick marked a milestone in the history of
science and gave rise to modern molecular biology.
• This discovery made him, James Watson and Maurice Wilkins
the recipients of the 1962 Nobel Prize for Physiology or
Medicine for solving the structure of DNA. He was made an
F.R.S. (Fellow of the Royal Society) in 1959. He was awarded
the Prix Charles Leopold Meyer of the French Academy of
Sciences in 1961, and the Award of Merit of the Gairdner
Foundation in 1962.
FRANCIS
CRICK • Together with James Watson, he was a Warren Triennial
Prize Lecturer in 1959 and received a Research Corporation
Award in 1962. 
• He provided genetic proof that a triplet code was used in
reading genetic material, an effort he did together with
Sydney Brenner in 1961.
• Crick died of colon cancer on the morning of 28 July 2004 at
the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) Thornton
Hospital in La Jolla; he was cremated and his ashes were
scattered into the Pacific Ocean.
JAMES WATSON
• James Dewey Watson was born in Chicago, Ill., on April 6th, 1928.
• Young Watson’s entire boyhood was spent in Chicago where he
attended for eight years Horace Mann Grammar School and for two
years South Shore High School.
• He received a scholarship to the University of Chicago and entered
their experimental four-year college, from which he obtained his B.Sc.
Degree in Zoology.
• His boyhood interest in bird-watching had matured into a serious
desire to learn genetics. This became possible when he received a
Fellowship for graduate study in Zoology at Indiana University in
Bloomington, where he received his Ph.D. degree in Zoology in 1950. 
JAMES WATSON
• After his Ph.D. in 1950, Watson spent time in Europe, first
in Copenhagen and then at the Cavendish Laboratory of
the University of Cambridge.
• He met Francis Crick in the University of Cambridge, and
both worked together in building the first accurate model
of the DNA structure.
• Watson has played a significant role in the development of
science policy, from the War on Cancer, through the
debates over the use of recombinant DNA, to promoting
the Human Genome Project. From 1988 to 1992, he ran
the Human Genome Project at the National Institutes of
Health while still directing Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory.
JAMES WATSON
• The honours that have to come to Watson include: the
John Collins Warren Prize of the Massachusetts General
Hospital, with Crick in 1959; the Eli Lilly Award in
Biochemistry in the same year; the Lasker Award, with
Crick and Wilkins in 1960; the Research Corporation Prize,
with Crick in 1962; membership of the American Academy
of Arts and Sciences and the National Academy of Sciences,
and Foreign membership of the Danish Academy of Arts
and Sciences. He is also a consultant to the President’s
Scientific Advisory Committee.
• His major interest is education. His first
textbook, Molecular Biology of the Gene, set new standards
for biology textbooks, and it was followed by Molecular
Biology of the Cell, and Recombinant DNA.
ROSALIND
FRANKLIN
• Rosalind Elsie Franklin was born on July 25, 1920 in
London, England.
• She was extremely intelligent; she knew by the age of
15 that she wanted to be a scientist.
• It is through her excellent education from St. Paul’s
Girls’ School that she was able to enter Cambridge
University to study chemistry.
• After years of academic research and laboratory
experimentation, she was offered a 3-year scholarship
at King’s College in London, in which she was tasked to
improve its X-ray crystallography unit. 
ROSALIND
FRANKLIN
• Her experiences at the Laboratoire Central des
Services Chimiques de l'Etat in France led her to learn
the different techniques in X-ray diffraction.
• Working with a student, Raymond Gosling, Franklin
was able to get two sets of high-resolution photos of
crystallized DNA fibers. She used two different fibers
of DNA, one more highly hydrated than the other.
From this she deduced the basic dimensions of DNA
strands, and that the phosphates were on the outside
of what was probably a helical structure.
• She presented her data in a lecture at King’s College,
which proved the three-dimensional structure Crick
and Watson had theorized for DNA.
ROSALIND
FRANKLIN
• In 1953, both Wilkins and Franklin published papers
on their X-ray data in the same Nature issue with
Watson and Crick's paper on the structure of DNA.
• Franklin left Cambridge in 1953 and went to the
Birkbeck lab to work on the structure of tobacco
mosaic virus. She published a number of papers on
the subject and she actually did a lot of the work
while suffering from cancer. She died from cancer in
1958.
• She was not a Nobel prize holder, for the Nobel
committee does not award posthumously.
MAURICE
WILKINS
• Maurice Hugh Frederick Wilkins was born at Pongaroa,
New Zealand, on December 15th, 1916.
• At the age of 6, Wilkins was brought to England and
educated at King Edward’s School, Birmingham.
• He studied physics at St. John’s College, Cambridge,
taking his degree in 1938. He then went to Birmingham
University, where he became research assistant to Dr.
John Randall in the Physics Department.
• Wilkins believes that having spent his formative years in
New Zealand, he was imbued with the exploratory and
adventuresome nature of the early settlers - traits that
proved useful in his career as a scientist.
MAURICE WILKINS
• In 1943, the physics department at
Birmingham University, Wilkins included,
moved to Berkeley, California to work on
the Manhattan Project. At the time, it was all
part of the war effort.
• After the war, Wilkins was hired as a physics
lecturer at St. Andrews' University. Here, he
again met with John Randall, who wanted to
use physics to study biological problems.
Randall was offered a full professorship
at King's College in London and there he set
up a biophysics lab with Wilkins as one of his
members of the Medical Research Council
Biophysics Research Unit.
MAURICE WILKINS
• Wilkins studied biological molecules like DNA and
viruses using a variety of microscopes and
spectrophotometers. He eventually began using X-
rays to produce diffraction images of DNA
molecules.
• The X-ray diffraction images produced by him,
Rosalind Franklin, and Raymond Gosling led to the
deduction by James Watson and Francis Crick of
the 3-dimensional helical nature of DNA.
• Wilkins shared the 1962 Nobel Prize in Physiology
or Medicine with Watson and Crick. Wilkins was
made a Companion of the British Empire in 1962
and won other awards and prizes for his work.
SEVERO OCHOA
• Severo Ochoa was born at Luarca, Spain, on September
24th, 1905.
• Ochoa was educated at Málaga College, where he took his
B.A. degree in 1921.
• His interest in biology was greatly stimulated by the
publications of the great Spanish neurologist, Ramón y
Cajal, and he went to the Medical School of the University
of Madrid, where he obtained his M.D. degree (with
honours) in 1929. 
• While he was at the University he was Assistant to
Professor Juan Negrin and he paid, during the summer of
1927, a visit to the University of Glasgow to work under
Professor D. Noel Paton.
SEVERO OCHOA
• After graduating in 1929, Ochoa went, with the aid of the
Spanish Council of Scientific Research, to work at the Kaiser
Wilhelm Institut für Medizinische Forschung at Heidelberg.
During this period he worked on the biochemistry and
physiology of muscle.
• In 1931, Ochoa was appointed Lecturer in Physiology at the
University of Madrid, a post he held until 1935. In 1932 he
went to the National Institute for Medical Research, London,
where he worked with Dr. H. W. Dudley on his first problem in
enzymology.
• Ochoa’s research has dealt mainly with enzymatic processes
in biological oxidation and synthesis and the transfer of
energy. It has contributed much to the knowledge of the basic
steps in the metabolism of carbohydrates and fatty acids, the
utilization of carbon dioxide, and the biosynthesis of nucleic
acids.
SEVERO OCHOA
• It has included the biological functions of vitamin B1,
oxidative phosphorylation, the reductive carboxylation of
ketoglutaric and pyruvic acids, the photochemical
reduction of pyridine nucleotides in photosynthesis,
condensing enzyme – which is the key enzyme of the Krebs
citric acid cycle, polynucleotide phosphorylase and the
genetic code.
• Ochoa holds honorary degrees of the Universities of St.
Louis (Washington University), Glasgow, Oxford,
Salamanca, Brazil, and the Wesleyan University. He is
Honorary Professor of the University of San Marcos, Lima,
Peru. He was awarded the Neuberg Medal in Biochemistry
in 1951, the Medal of the Société de Chimie Biologique in
1959, and the Medal of New York University in the same
year.
IN SUMMARY
• The efforts and initiatives of the brightest
minds had led to the rise of a new field in Pure
Sciences – Molecular Genetics.
• The outputs of Wilkins, strengthened by
Franklin, proved the theories of Crick and
Watson to be factual.
• Wilkins, Crick and Watson were awarded the
Nobel Prize for their breakthrough in genetics,
discovering the structure of DNA (double-helix).
Franklin on the other hand was not a recipient.
• Severo Ochoa laid the foundations regarding
the synthesis of RNA, being awarded the Nobel
Prize for Physiology or Medicine.
• Without their contributions, scientific and
technological advancement we experience
today would not be realized.