Raising questions on James Watson and The Nobel Prize

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By

Sampson I.M Onwuka 

 James Watson and The Nobel Prize

Am confident that James Watson did not discover the Double Helix in the way he explained it with actual graph and illustration. I think Him and Maurice Wilkins must have gotten into Roselyn Franklin's office and took the picture of her latest work on the Cystography of the protein structure. 

The idea to possibly steal the negative from her may have started perhaps with the visit of Ms. Franklin the wife of Wilkins where according to Judson she brought her latest pictures from the office she is under the employment of these scientists. There are however some questions on the nature of this visit, to the extent that a consensus was perhaps arrived at in the early months of 1953.

Here's what I think happened, that after she showed the picture which emerged differently from the negative treated in water, she probably began to doubt if the Alpha Helix story was actually accurate in describing the DNA. The Story is not exhausted but the extent to which the discoveries made science into a different lifestyle is an article of history. 

It reaches meaning to discuss some of its impact on study on medicine and in dealing with HIV. It is not a position that needs to be defended but it looks terrible to ignore the lessons of HIV and the latest knowledge on DNA do not combine very well. 

To that clear scientific understanding, we may add that James Watson as one of the intellectual auteurs of the last century on the same rank as perhaps William (Bill) Gates Jr, and compeers Steve Jobs, or perhaps the Polio magicians of John Enders, Albert Sabin, and Jonas Salk. Of course intellectual stars are the rue of all discussions on sciences and its breakthrough ; Albert Einstein, Steve Hawking for a start, and the course of HIV. 

In this discipleship, the intellectual breakthrough of the last century especially on DNA may explicate on HIV and may grant us some knowledge of why we fail and why succeed in the study of sciences.   

The negative showed a double Helix Intertwined on its axle, but Ms. Franklin probably did not know what it meant either did Wilkins' wife. But it is clear that these two women suspected something leading me to consider that Wilkin's wife betrayed the information to her Husband who may or may not recognized what it meant. 

Later on, these two men, Watson and Wilkins were said to have visited Franklin's office and after she found out and began to lock it, they found a way to break into the office. As suspected from the story, Ms. Franklin had to be fired, and from several sources, a tantrum broke up between Watson and Franklin leading to her dismissal. 

She must have recognized that the negative was missing for it seems to me that the scientific accuracy of Watson's drawing which a friend of his Francis Crick who was a major in the field did not recognize, was based on what Watson and Wilkins took from Franklin's office. 

I think it was the first and original negative of the new pictures of the DNA which appeared differently and clearly when treated like normal pictures in Water. 

Put it together, there is a chance that either Watson or Franklin didn't see eye to eye, that Watson suspected Franklin of hoarding information, though by agreement she was not a scientist involved in the same process as was Wilkins, Watson, and Crick, but was at least from all accounts a scientist in her own department. Sharing information was to the process but these men probably did not see her as a fellow scientist or a scientist in their field.

Put it differently, the transfer of academic search for the DNA may have started with Bragg and Cavendish, may have shifted to US through Linus Pauling and his work on Alpha Helix, but the final puzzle on the structure of the Helix and DNA which since Oswald Avery was a confirmation that Erwin Schrodinger's 'Script code' suggesting DNA or Amino Acid was the stricture and building (genetic) blocks of life and not protein, scientist struggled to decode the DNA. 

The picture of the Code was made possible through these picture which WATSON, WILKINS AND CRICK, probably did not tell us was possible through a wet process of putting the negative in water. 

It will be stupid to fail to recognize the efforts of Watson, Crick and Wilkins in transforming molecular biology, a statement of fact confirmed by one my favorite Biologist, Jacque Monod on Crick and Watson, with Wilkins as the most astute of the living biologist despite the suspicion of his role as an English spy, but then there are tons of others of the same category. 

The exceptional quality and greatness of Watson and Wilkins breakthrough was in the scientific process which they purportedly in discovery a Double Helix or Double Headed Helix, may explain Franklin's objection or at least suspicion of the Alpha Helix theory applicable at such level, but from all information at the period seemed to the rest of world that scientific and even prophetic intelligent of Watson to have manufactured the picture which after several picture was made possible there was prove of their scientific breakthrough which I think was perhaps based no such on the grasp of the sciences involved but on the pictures and photo-graphs made Ms. Franklin.   

     

Some of the papers she shared online have gaps in its synthesis. For instance, she pointed to somewhere in West Africa as the probably origins of human beings and the beginning of human diaspora/dispersion. 

It is not impossible to argue against her thesis or assumptions but she may have borrowed the theory of African human dispersion to compensate the basis for Africa as the formative of languages of the world. But you have look at the different angle of language origins as a form of evolving and evolved abstract representation, that letters began not ad nova but as a deliberate representation of many elements of the human thinking. 

For instance humans are said by anthropologist to consider what is front of them, besides them, covering the four cardinal relational in local, geospatial local, geospatial global, transduction, degrees of motion; rotation, by comparison, by additional, transition, etc. 

But the chief forms of Art which is closer writings and then language is Abstractions, which are Art forms primary based on existing Arts then either as a repeat of these natural imitations of human Art provoke human reason to attempt a symbol.