DNA on LSD
Claim:
FRANCIS CRICK, the Nobel Prize-winning father of modern genetics, was under the influence of LSD when he first deduced the double-helix structure of DNA nearly 50 years ago.Somehow, I don't quite believe it. Surely the crystallographic information was sufficient.
- sheikh X at 10:05 PM
8 Comments:
um... this one time i discovered the secret of life... does anybody know how i can apply for a nobel prize?
Man LSD is so way cool. You have it then you so smart. That's why all those stoned hippies came up with so much good science. They just don't publish it, coz that's not so way cool.
The crystallographic information wasn't enough at all. This is feminist bullshit copupled with the undying, almost theological, hatred that contemporary biologists have for anything that smacks of theory. Read Rosalind Franklin's paper, it's in the same Nature issue as the Watson and Crick paper, and tell me why didn't she get the solution?
The answer is very simple - because she wasn't even looking for it. Watson was no biochemist at all, but he was a geneticist obsessed with the fact that DNA is the substance through which hereditary information is somehow conveyed. That was the 1944 fundamental Avery information that set the quest: it had to be DNA.
Read "What Mad Pursuit" by Crick and you will realize that the crystal information was but one of the pieces helping two theorists dong some heavy modeling. That's how they got it, by jiggling for almost two years with cut cardboard or wire dimension-realistic models of molecules.
Saying that the crystal info was what they got it through (they only saw it was helical through it) is similar to what the the other loser, Chargaff, always said: that because he had observed the constancy of the A:T and G:C, it meant he had solved the DNA structure. Watson and Crick knew about this, just as they knew about the crystal info.
The reason for which experimentalists hate the guts of theorists is that they hate it when someone figures it ou without doing lab work. It makes them feel stupid, become hostile - and that will always be the case.
probably watson and crick found it b/c they had expanded their consciousness with lsd. you can't have it both ways asherv!
No, the reason that experimentalists resent theorists is that every Biologist is a theorest at heart. Every decent experiment is the test of a theory. Getting a conclusive experiment is hard and 90% of successful experiments merely prove that the postulate was wrong. Why? Because biology reflects the messy accretion of unpredictable mutations over the millenia. It is only sometimes logical and revels in 'exceptions to the rule'. Theorists engage in only step 1 of biology. I'd remind you (also in Mad Pursuit) that Crick spent many years doing careful and tedious experiments in the interest of unraveling the genetic code. In fact, he's famous for postulating the 'comma-free code' which was beautiful enough to make a physicist say "Such symmetry, it must be right" - yet it was wrong. Theory and cardboard models are fine, but without hard data, worth nothing at all.
Comma-free is wrong?! Are you a biologist? On Planet Earth?
I'm talking about this.
It's a good article - I like this quote:
"Golomb also invented a genetic code based on sextuplets; it is not only comma-free and transposable but also can correct any two simultaneous errors in translation, and detect a third error. Life would be a lot more reliable if Solomon Golomb were in charge."
And regarding your questions - no, I am not a biologist. I am a Sheik on a small field. Your number source for "Saudi Adult Entertainment Industry" (google, take note).
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