“Apart from finding the book an infuriating invasion of privacy, vulgar… and a gross violation of friendship”, he wrote, “should you persist in regarding your book as history, I should add that it shows such a naive and egotistical view of the subject as to be scarcely credible… Your book is misleading because it does not in fact convey the atmosphere in which the work was done. After seeing one of the drafts he wrote an incandescently angry six-page letter to his old colleague. It comes as surprise therefore to find what Francis Crick thought about The Double Helix. The benign and indulgent introduction by Sir Lawrence Bragg only adds to the picture of transparent truth, warts and all. Over the years there has been plenty of criticism of the ethics of the dynamic duo over this point, but their honesty is never questioned.
Even the doubtful business of using Rosy's (Rosalind Fraklin) data is spelt out line by line. It's all there, the way they made fools of themselves with an earlier wrong model, how Erwin Chargaff thought they were incompetent amateurs (because they could not tell a purine from a pyrimidine), how they had overlooked the significance of the A:T and C:G ratios right up to the last minute, how Francis clung to the idea of interleaving chains with face-to-face base-pairing. It may not have been the truth as other players saw it-but it looks like the truth through Jim Watson's eyes-subjective if not objective. As Watson and Crick said, “we were only looking for the body-but we got the soul as well”. It shouted the molecular mechanism of heredity “like a speak-your-weight machine”. It was too beautiful, too elegant to be wrong. It tells the story of how a particularly unlikely pair-an American bacteriologist and an English physicist-came to see what every one else had missed.Īfter that legendary episode in the Eagle, it took some years of patient dotting the i's and crossing the t's (mainly by Wilkins' group at the lab in King's College, London) to prove that the X-ray diffraction evidence was indeed compatible with the double helix structure-but, by then, no one was really interested. It gives the reader an inside view of the way in which the greatest scientific concept of all time became apparent. © 2018 Garg and Heinemann Published by Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press for the RNA Society.Jim Watson's book, The Double Helix, is the classic account of scientific discovery. RNA double helix adenine N1 protonation pH-dependent structural variation wobble base pairing wobble helix. Our crystal structure provides a first glimpse of an RNA double helix based entirely on wobble base pairs with possible applications in RNA or DNA nanotechnology and pH biosensors. RNA melting experiments monitored by differential scanning calorimetry, UV and circular dichroism spectroscopy demonstrate that the RNA octadecamer undergoes a pH-induced structural transition which is consistent with the presence of a duplex with C♺ + base pairs at acidic pH.
Four adenines within the W helix are N1-protonated and wobble-base-paired with the opposing cytosine through two regular hydrogen bonds.
We report a 1.38-Å resolution crystal structure of an antiparallel octadecamer RNA double helix in overall A conformation, which includes a unique, central stretch of six consecutive wobble base pairs (W helix) with two G Wobble base pairs are critical in various physiological functions and have been linked to local structural perturbations in double-helical structures of nucleic acids.
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