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DNA Movie
Proposed Event, NOT firm.
| Where: |
MEMBERS ONLY |
| When: |
Tue Jun 30 |
| Contact: |
Contact Form |
| Public details: Scientists in the early 1950s knew that genes existed but not how they worked. Some evidence suggested that genes were made of DNA, not protein, surprising as proteins were interesting, complex and versatile, and they actually do things like make muscles contract. In contrast DNA has only 6 components, didn’t appear to do anything, and when pure looks like a piece of snot. In the early 1950s some very smart people including James Watson, Francis Crick and Linus Pauling realized that if you knew the 3D structure of DNA you might understand how it encoded genetic information, if that was in fact what it did. Watson and Crick, working in Cambridge U.K., figured it out first, after various blunders, politics, personal conflicts and other problems. The structure they published in 1953 made it extremely obvious how DNA could encode genetic information and other researchers rapidly figured out how the coding was employed in practice. The Watson/Crick work was arguably the most significant breakthrough in biology ever. The story was and is very controversial as the data Watson and Crick used was not their own but taken somewhat surreptitiously from a lab in London. Particularly controversial is what happened to Rosalind Franklin who generated that original data. The BBC made a movie about all this with Watson played by Jeff Goldblum, Crick by Tim Piggot-Smith and many other well known British actors. The movie is pretty accurate, the actors are similar in appearance to the real people, and it makes you think about how science works and possibly how it shouldn’t work. It’s also quite amusing in many places. The movie is called “Life Story” and is not well known because an educational organization exclusively licensed it for many years and sold the DVD at a fairly outrageous price. Anyway I bought the DVD as it interested me. I think Vimeo and some other sites do have possibly pirated versions of it online now but the resolution looked pretty bad. So I can play the DVD for the Adventure Club if there is enough interest… |
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