Michael J. Behe's Blog, page 50

At Science Daily: Scientists discover new ‘origins of life’ chemical reactions

The reaction generates amino acids and nucleic acids, the building blocks of proteins and DNA.

Four billion years ago, the Earth looked very different than it does today, devoid of life and covered by a vast ocean. Over the course of millions of years, in that primordial soup, life emerged. Researchers have long theorized how molecules came together to spark this transition. Now, scientists at Scripps Research have discovered a new set of chemical reactions that use cyanide, ammonia and carbon dioxide — all thought to be common on the early earth — to generate amino acids and nucleic acids, the building blocks of proteins and DNA.

“We’ve come up with a new paradigm to explain this shift from prebiotic to biotic chemistry,” says Ramanarayanan Krishnamurthy, PhD, an associate professor of chemistry at Scripps Research, and lead author of the new paper, published July 28, 2022 in the journal Nature Chemistry. “We think the kind of reactions we’ve described are probably what could have happened on early earth.”

In cells today, amino acids are generated from precursors called α-keto acids using both nitrogen and specialized proteins called enzymes. Researchers have found evidence that α-keto acids likely existed early in Earth’s history. However, many have hypothesized that before the advent of cellular life, amino acids must have been generated from completely different precursors, aldehydes, rather than α-keto acids, since enzymes to carry out the conversion did not yet exist. But that idea has led to debate about how and when the switch occurred from aldehydes to α-keto acids as the key ingredient for making amino acids.

After their success using cyanide to drive other chemical reactions, Krishnamurthy and his colleagues suspected that cyanide, even without enzymes, might also help turn α-keto acids into amino acids. Because they knew nitrogen would be required in some form, they added ammonia — a form of nitrogen that would have been present on the early earth. Then, through trial and error, they discovered a third key ingredient: carbon dioxide. With this mixture, they quickly started seeing amino acids form.

“We were expecting it to be quite difficult to figure this out, and it turned out to be even simpler than we had imagined,” says Krishnamurthy. “If you mix only the keto acid, cyanide and ammonia, it just sits there. As soon as you add carbon dioxide, even trace amounts, the reaction picks up speed.”

In the process of studying their chemical soup, Krishnamurthy’s group discovered that a byproduct of the same reaction is orotate, a precursor to nucleotides that make up DNA and RNA. This suggests that the same primordial soup, under the right conditions, could have given rise to a large number of the molecules that are required for the key elements of life.

“What we want to do next is continue probing what kind of chemistry can emerge from this mixture,” says Krishnamurthy. “Can amino acids start forming small proteins? Could one of those proteins come back and begin to act as an enzyme to make more of these amino acids?”

Full article at Science Daily.

Amino acids have been made via chemical reactions involving prebiotic ingredients. But no one has ever synthesized a single protein molecule in this way. Why? Information theory analysis suggests that it is because the information content of the initial chemical bath exceeds that of the amino acids, but the information content of even a simple protein far exceeds that of the initial environment out of which it is supposed to form. Stephen Meyer and Douglas Axe address the information barrier to the spontaneous formation of complex biomolecules here and here, respectively.

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Smithsonian Magazine: Why Did Europeans Evolve Into Becoming Lactose Tolerant?

Famine and disease from millennia ago likely spurred the rapid evolution of the trait on the continent.

Brian Handwerk writes:

Just 5,000 years ago, even though it was a part of their diet, virtually no adult humans could properly digest milk. But in the blink of an evolutionary eye northern Europeans began inheriting a genetic mutation that enabled them to do so. The trait became common in just a few thousand years, and today it’s found in up to 95 percent of the population. By piecing together Neolithic pottery fragments and ancient human genomes, scientists may have solved the riddle of how European lactose tolerance evolved.

Based on the remnants left on pottery fragments, researchers can say northern Europeans have been drinking milk for 9,000 years.  Seksan Mongkhonkhamsao via Getty Images

In a study published today in Nature, researchers compared archaeological evidence for 9,000 years of European milk use with genetics, and found an unusually rapid, evolution of lactose tolerance among Europeans well after they first started consuming the beverage. The authors suggest that something more extreme than regular milk consumption drove the genetic change. Exceptional stressors like famines and pathogens may have exacerbated milk’s typically mild gastrointestinal effects on the lactose intolerant, creating deadly bouts of diarrhea and dehydration while making the ability to digest milk extra valuable.

“It rewrites the textbooks on why drinking milk was an advantage,” says lead author Richard Evershed, director of the Biogeochemistry Research Center at the University of Bristol. “In order to evolve a genetic mutation so quickly, something has to kill off the people that don’t carry it.”

Almost all babies around the world are born with the ability to digest lactose—after all, it’s found in breast milk. But about two-thirds of adults can no longer digest the natural milk sugar because the production of a milk-digesting enzyme called lactase switches off after they’ve finished weaning. That’s why the majority of the world’s adult population is lactase non-persistent, otherwise known as lactose intolerant.

The other third of the world’s adult population has evolved lactose tolerance, meaning they keep producing lactase, and that’s particularly true among groups like those of northern European descent.

“When you look at the ancient genomes no one has lactose tolerance until recently, the past few thousand years.” For a genetic trait to become widespread that quickly, there should be a very important reason why people who have it survive and reproduce, while others die off.

Richard Evershed and colleagues mapped human milk use during the past 9,000 years, creating an enormous database from 6,899 animal fat residues derived from 13,181 fragments of pottery from 554 archaeological sites around Europe. Over the past three decades scientists, with experts like Evershed at the fore, have developed methods to analyze ancient pottery and reveal evidence of what it contained.

Evershed found plentiful evidence that humans were drinking milk widely, across Europe, from around 9,000 years ago.

George Davey Smith’s finding created another question for researchers; if lactose intolerant individuals can drink milk with no major ill effects, what drove the dramatic genetic shift that caused so many Europeans to quickly develop lactose tolerance?

Some factor or factors must have fast-forwarded the evolution of lactose tolerance, likely by making it critically important and even a matter of life and death.

Wilkin adds that scientists have been floating various ideas to explain the mysteries of milk digestion, including how lactose tolerance evolved so late and so quickly, and why heavy milk consumers like the steppe dwellers remain lactose intolerant. Now, she says, a framework exists that can further investigate those questions.

Full article at Smithsonian.

Note: This example of “rapid evolution” appears to only be adaptation based on pre-existing variations in the human genome (in order to favor survival), not the production of novel genetic information based on random processes of any kind. As such, might it not serve as additional evidence of intelligent design?

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At Sci-News: Moths Produce Ultrasonic Defensive Sounds to Fend Off Bat Predators

Scientists from Boise State University and elsewhere have tested 252 genera from most families of large-bodied moths. Their results show that ultrasound-producing moths are far more widespread than previously thought, adding three new sound-producing organs, eight new subfamilies and potentially thousands of species to the roster.

A molecular phylogeny of Lepidoptera indicating antipredator ultrasound production across the order. Image credit: Barber et al., doi: 10.1073/pnas.2117485119.

Bats pierce the shadows with ultrasonic pulses that enable them to construct an auditory map of their surroundings, which is bad news for moths, one of their favorite foods.

However, not all moths are defenseless prey. Some emit ultrasonic signals of their own that startle bats into breaking off pursuit.

Many moths that contain bitter toxins avoid capture altogether by producing distinct ultrasounds that alert bats to their foul taste. Others conceal themselves in a shroud of sonar-jamming static that makes them hard to find with bat echolocation.

While effective, these types of auditory defense mechanisms in moths are considered relatively rare, known only in tiger moths, hawk moths and a single species of geometrid moth.

“It’s not just tiger moths and hawk moths that are doing this,” said Dr. Akito Kawahara, a researcher at the Florida Museum of Natural History.

“There are tons of moths that create ultrasonic sounds, and we hardly know anything about them.”

In the same way that non-toxic butterflies mimic the colors and wing patterns of less savory species, moths that lack the benefit of built-in toxins can copy the pitch and timbre of genuinely unappetizing relatives.

These ultrasonic warning systems seem so useful for evading bats that they’ve evolved independently in moths on multiple separate occasions.

In each case, moths transformed a different part of their bodies into finely tuned organic instruments.

[I’ve put these quotes from the article in bold to highlight the juxtaposition of “evolved independently” and “finely tuned organic instruments.” Fine-tuning is, of course, often associated with intelligent design, rather than unguided natural processes.]

See the full article in Sci-News.

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At Live Science: How many people can Earth support?

Martin McGuigan  reports:

There are nearly 8 billion people(opens in new tab) living on Earth today, but our planet wasn’t always so crowded.

Around 300,000 years ago, when Homo sapiens likely first appeared, our total population was small, between 100 and 10,000 people. There were so few people at the start, that it took approximately 35,000 years for the human population to double in size, according to Joel E. Cohen, head of the Laboratory of Populations at the Rockefeller University and Columbia University in New York City. After the invention of agriculture between 15,000 and 10,000 years ago, when there were between 1 million and 10 million individuals on Earth, it took 1,500 years for the human population to double. By the 16th century, the time needed for the population to double dropped to 300 years. And by the turn of the 19th century, it took a mere 130 years. 

Most experts think planet Earth can support about 10 billion people, and that when our population reaches that number, it will start to decline. (Image credit: Ayhan Altun)

From 1930 to 1974, the Earth‘s population doubled again, in just 44 years. But is the human population expected to continue growing at this rate? And is there an upper limit to how many humans our planet can support?

“The future of the world population is driven by a mixture of survival and reproduction,” Patrick Gerland at the United Nations (UN) Population Division in New York City, told Live Science. “If you have a ratio of two children per couple, then you can keep going to a more or less stable size of the population. Once you get to a number smaller than two, from one generation to the next, your population will shrink, or decline. If you are above that and the majority of people survive, then your population will grow.” 

Many low-income countries around the world have high birth rates and large family sizes, but also a high rate of infant mortality and shorter lifespans. But, Gerland said, “More and more countries, once they reach a certain stage of socioeconomic cultural development, tend to converge towards about two children [per couple] or fewer.” This means that while access to health care increases lifespans, suggesting population growth, this tends to occur in countries with a falling birth rate.

Global population growth peaked in the 1960s and has slowed since then. In 1950, the average birth rate was 5.05 children per woman, according to the UN Population Division(opens in new tab). In 2020, it had fallen to 2.44 children per woman. 

As Gerland explained, “Right now the scientific consensus is that the population of the world will reach a peak some time later this century. The world population is projected to reach 10.4 billion people sometime in the 2080s and remain there until 2100, according to the United Nations Population Division. But Gerland stressed the further that demographers look into the future, the more speculative and uncertain their predictions become.

Full article at Live Science.

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Life from a rock?

Over the last couple of centuries, science has had great success in explaining natural phenomena in terms of natural processes. For example, research and development efforts have given us automobile engines that are much more efficient than they were when cars first came on the scene. The science of biology has also exhibited tremendous advancement in probing the inner workings of the cells of life. Shouldn’t science continue this trend in searching for a natural explanation for the origin and development of life on Earth?

Why shouldn’t we assume that inanimate objects (atoms and molecules) in conjunction with natural sources of energy can create life? One reason is that our advancing knowledge of the biochemical activities within the cell has revealed a metropolis of mechanisms that far surpasses the functional complexity of anything else observed in the universe. We could plausibly continue to assume that life arose naturally if it could be demonstrated that natural processes systematically increase the information content of closed systems over time. But to persist in believing that nature can do something that contradicts natural law is not science, but a form of idolatry.

Prescientific peoples used to worship rocks or carved pieces of wood and declare, “My father!” But that practice became unfashionable well before the age of science. So then, it was thought that the Earth gave birth to life (exchanging a small rock for a large one). But scientists began to realize that even this was unlikely, so an appeal was made to the greater universe for the origin of life.1  With the advent of further understanding of the vast information content of biomolecules and the low probability of any sort of chance assemblage of such molecules within our universe, the size of the “rock” was enormously expanded to encompass multiple universes. How much bigger could it get? Does size even matter? Isn’t it all fraught with the same essential absurdity—calling a rock, “My father!”?

Perhaps we unconsciously ascribe fertility to the Earth, since out of its soil grow all of the plants that provide food for animals and for us. And yet the Earth would produce nothing without the seeds of the plants. One of biology’s “universal laws” (accredited to Rudolph Virchow) states, “Every cell comes from a pre-existent cell.”2 So, we look to the seed, and what do we find? A rich storehouse of information coded in the seed’s DNA. We find information as the source of the physical complexity of life; the Earth is just the environment in which the seed’s hidden information can be unfolded and activated.

From where does the information embedded within the seed come? Not from the Earth, nor from the stars, nor from the Big Bang origin of the physical universe.

Canceled Science, p. 212

The level of information found within a seed can only come from a mind so far above our own that to ascribe it to God is not a statement of religion, but of logic. As physicist Gerald Schroeder has said, “information…is the link between the metaphysical Creator and the physical creation. It is the hidden face of God.”3 

1. F. H. C. Crick and L. E. Orgel, “Directed Panspermia,” Icarus 19 (1973): 341-346.

2. Franklin M. Harold, The Way of the Cell: Molecules, Organisms and the Order of Life (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2001), p. 99.

3. Gerald L. Schroeder, The Hidden Face of God: Science Reveals the Ultimate Truth (Touchstone, New York, 2001), p. 49.

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At SciNews: Study: Massive Galilean Moons Prevented Formation of Giant Ring System around Jupiter

Planetary rings are often speculated as being a relatively common attribute of giant planets, partly based on their prevalence within the Solar System. However, their formation and sustainability remain a topic of open discussion, and Jupiter — the most massive planet within our planetary system — harbors a very modest ring system.

A distinctive common feature of solar system giant planets is the presence of ring systems orbiting the planet.

Rings systems have been detected and studied extensively for each of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune.

Jupiter and its Galilean moons: Europa, Ganymede, Io and Callisto. Image credit: Galileo Project / Voyager Project / NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

In particular, the prominent rings of Saturn have been the source of numerous studies with regards to their formation and dynamics.

By comparison, Jupiter contains a substantially more modest ring system that has been extensively studied via data from such missions as Voyager and Galileo, as well as ground-based observations.

Theories regarding the origin and evolution of the Jovian rings vary, such as their possible formation along with the Galilean moons (Europa, Ganymede, Io and Callisto), and the contributions of collisional material lost from inclined satellites and escaping material from the Galilean satellites and/or the inner small moons.

Further possible sources of potential ring material originate from impact debris and the tidal disruption of satellites or large passing Kuiper Belt objects.

“It’s long bothered me why Jupiter doesn’t have even more amazing rings that would put Saturn’s to shame,” said lead author Dr. Stephen Kane, an astrophysicist in the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences at the University of California, Riverside.

“If Jupiter did have them, they’d appear even brighter to us, because the planet is so much closer than Saturn.”

“I also had questions about whether Jupiter once had fantastic rings and lost them. It is possible for ring structures to be temporary.”

To understand the reason Jupiter currently looks the way it does, Dr. Kane and his colleague, University of California, Riverside graduate student Zhexing Li, ran a dynamic computer simulation accounting for the orbits of the Galilean moons, as well as the orbit of the planet itself, and information about the time it takes for rings to form.

Saturn’s rings are largely made of ice, some of which may have come from comets, which are also largely made of ice.

If moons are massive enough, their gravity can toss the ice out of a planet’s orbit, or change the orbit of the ice enough so that it collides with the moons.

“We found that the Galilean moons of Jupiter, one of which is the largest moon in our Solar System, would very quickly destroy any large rings that might form,” Dr. Kane said.

“As a result, it is unlikely that Jupiter had large rings at any point in its past.”

“Massive planets form massive moons, which prevents them from having substantial rings.”

The findings appear in the Planetary Science Journal.

SciNews

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At SciTech Daily: Extraterrestrial Life: Ancient Microbes May Help Us Find Alien Life Forms

University of California Riverside reports:

Light-capturing proteins illuminate Earth of billions of years ago.

Scientists have reconstructed what life was like for some of Earth’s earliest organisms by using light-capturing proteins in living microbes. These endeavors could help us recognize signs of alien life on other planets, whose atmospheres may more closely resemble our early, pre-oxygen planet.

Crystal structure of rhodopsin: A G protein-coupled receptor (public domain).

The earliest living things on Earth, which included bacteria and single-celled organisms called archaea, inhabited a primarily oceanic planet without an ozone layer to protect them from the sun’s radiation. These microbes evolved rhodopsins, proteins with the ability to turn sunlight into energy, and used them to power cellular processes. 

“On early Earth, energy may have been very scarce. Bacteria and archaea figured out how to use the plentiful energy from the sun without the complex biomolecules required for photosynthesis,” said Edward Schwieterman, a University of California, Riverside astrobiologist and co-author of a study describing the research. 

Rhodopsins are related to rods and cones in human eyes that enable us to distinguish between light and dark and see colors. They are also widely distributed among modern organisms and environments such as saltern ponds, which present a rainbow of vibrant colors. 

Using a type of artificial intelligence called machine learning, the team of scientists analyzed rhodopsin protein sequences from all over the world and tracked how they evolved over time. Then, they created a type of family tree that allowed them to reconstruct rhodopsins from 2.5 to 4 billion years ago, and the conditions that they likely faced.

“Life as we know it is as much an expression of the conditions on our planet as it is of life itself. We resurrected ancient DNA sequences of one molecule, and it allowed us to link to the biology and environment of the past,” said University of Wisconsin-Madison astrobiologist and study lead Betul Kacar.

Since ancient Earth did not yet have the benefit of an ozone layer, the research team theorizes that billions-of-years-old microbes lived many meters down in the water column to shield themselves from intense UVB radiation at the surface.

Blue and green light best penetrates water, so it is likely that the earliest rhodopsins primarily absorbed these colors. “This could be the best combination of being shielded and still being able to absorb light for energy,” Schwieterman said.

After the Great Oxidation Event, more than 2 billion years ago, Earth’s atmosphere began to experience a rise in the amount of oxygen. With additional oxygen and ozone in the atmosphere, rhodopsins evolved to absorb additional colors of light.

Rhodopsins today are able to absorb colors of light that chlorophyll pigments in plants cannot. Though they represent completely unrelated and independent light capture mechanisms, they absorb complementary areas of the spectrum.

“This suggests co-evolution, in that one group of organisms is exploiting light not absorbed by the other,” Schwieterman said. “This could have been because rhodopsins developed first and screened out the green light, so chlorophylls later developed to absorb the rest. Or it could have happened the other way around.”

“Early Earth is an alien environment compared to our world today. Understanding how organisms here have changed with time and in different environments is going to teach us crucial things about how to search for and recognize life elsewhere,” Schwieterman said.

Full article at SciTech Daily.

The researchers calmly state: “These microbes evolved rhodopsins, proteins with the ability to turn sunlight into energy, and used them to power cellular processes.” How could unguided natural processes produce a complex, functional protein consisting of a specific sequence of 348 amino acids? The probabilistic resources of the entire universe render impossible the production of a single protein with only 150 amino acids in a specified sequence by chance. See Signature in the Cell, by Stephen Meyer.

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At Phys.org: Synthetic tools conduct messages from station to station in DNA

Rice University researchers report:

A team led by Rice bioengineer Isaac Hilton and graduate student Kaiyuan Wang used deactivated Cas9 (dCas9) proteins to target key segments of the human genome and synthetically trigger the transcription of human genes.

Rice University bioengineers are using deactivated Cas9 proteins to target key segments of the human genome and synthetically trigger the transcription of human genes. Credit: Sofia Escobar/Rice University

“We’re using these synthetic biology tools to improve the ability to engineer gene expression and program human cells, and consequently to better understand how our genes work naturally,” Hilton said. “These types of studies are important because in the long run this knowledge and these technical capabilities can enable better gene and cell therapies and biotechnologies.”

“Only around 2% of our genome contains protein-coding genes, and the remaining 98% is so-called noncoding DNA,” Hilton said. “Enhancers and promoters are key parts of our noncoding genomes and, although the vast majority of these elements do not make conventional genes, there is fascinating genetic variation in noncoding DNA. This variation gives us the magnificent diversity that enables our species to be both amazing and adaptable.”

“However, genetic variation in noncoding DNA is also strongly correlated with many diseases, and even subtle differences in these regions can be linked to pathologies,” he said. “A pressing challenge is that it is often very difficult to pinpoint how these differences influence disease onset and treatments.”

“Our goal and our hope is that technologies and approaches like ours can help researchers get closer to making those important connections, and to ultimately predict and thoughtfully intervene in disease,” Hilton said.

By synthetically activating noncoding DNA, the researchers demonstrated how promoters—short DNA sequences that mark the start sites of genes—and enhancers can communicate. Remarkably, enhancers can be thousands of base pairs away from their promoters but can stimulate gene transcription by recruiting activator proteins and by forming direct physical contacts with associated promoters.

Their strategy revealed that enhancers and promoters can have “intrinsic reciprocity.” While they knew that signals can be transmitted from an enhancer to a promoter, they learned that this transmission can go the other way as well.

“We see regulation taking place from a promoter to an upstream enhancer,” Wang said. “Mechanistically, that’s considered noncanonical and thus rather surprising.”

Full article at Phys.org.

Research is uncovering a greater degree of complexity within DNA beyond that of a “simple” library of genetic information. It’s worth noting that the proper functioning of enhancers and promoters within our non-coding DNA makes us “amazing and adaptable,” but that “even subtle differences in these regions can be linked to pathologies.” These observations point strongly to a tightly designed complex system whose functionality is dependent upon a very narrow parameter space within possible arrangements of the DNA’s base pairs.

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Apparently, scientists are the only ones exempt from the fact that we evolved to have biases…

At Mind Matters News: Claim: If science were properly presented, trust would grow!:

The summary concludes with the view that science needs to be presented in the right, targeted learning style…

In the closing lines of this summary, we learn

“As much as we pride ourselves on being logical beings, in reality, we humans are animals with messy minds that are just as governed by our social alliances, emotions, and instincts as our logic. Those of us involved with science, whether as supporters or practitioners, must understand and account for this. – Tessa Koumondoros, “These 4 Factors Can Explain Why So Many People Are Rejecting Science” at ScienceAlert (July 16, 2022) the paper requires a fee or subscription.”

The underlying assumption is that “Those of us involved with science” are somehow exempt from the bias problem — even though they have the same biology as everyone else and biology is supposed to rule!

News, “Claim: If science were properly presented, trust would grow!” at Mind Matters News (July 23, 2022)

Also:

The Royal Society advocated a much sounder approach recently: Quit worrying so much about “misinformation.” That only makes people trust less.

Some tips for people worried about why we don’t “Trust the science!” now:

“Misinformation” is often just unwelcome information, not incorrect information. Get used to it.Wuhan is not just a city in China. It stands for something.Don’t depend on the legacy mainstream media to save you. They are very out of touch and less trusted than you.

and

“When science becomes a substitute for religion or philosophy, it must bear the weight of being a certain kind of truth. The trouble is, science isn’t that kind of truth.”

Many people have noticed. Heck, they couldn’t help it.

News, “Claim: If science were properly presented, trust would grow!” at Mind Matters News (July 23, 2022)

Takehome: The ideas examined in these four short essays all assume that scientists are exempt from the bias and self-interest that governs everyone else.

We’re asked to believe that scientists are somehow exempt from the bias problem ingrained in our biology — yet they have the same biology as everyone else…

The paper, which requires a subscription, is “Why are people antiscience, and what can we do about it?” by Aviva Philipp-Muller, Spike W. S. Lee, and Richard E. Petty, July 12, 2022, PNAS 119 (30) e2120755119
https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2120755119

Here are all four parts of the series:

Why many now reject science… do you really want to know? COVID demonstrated — as nothing else could — that the “science” was all over the map and didn’t help people avoid panic. As the panic receded, the government started setting up a disinformation board to target NON-government sources of panic, thus deepening loss of trust.Researchers: Distrust of science is due to tribal loyalty. In Part 2 of 4, we look at a claim arising from a recent study: We blindly believe those we identify with, ignoring the wisdom of science. There seems to be no recognition that researchers, however fiercely competitive among themselves, also have a tribal loyalty that skews their judgment.Researchers: If we tell folks more about science, they trust less. Part 3: The researchers argue that doubts about science arise from conflict with beliefs. The many COVID-19 debacles suggest other causes… Generally, the remedy for loss of trust after widespread failures is reform of the system, not reform of its doubters. Post-COVID, scientists should take heed.

and

Claim: If science were properly presented, trust would grow! The ideas examined in these four short essays all assume that scientists are exempt from the bias and self-interest that governs everyone else. We’re asked to believe that scientists are somehow exempt from the bias problem ingrained in our biology — yet they have the same biology as everyone else…Copyright © 2022 Uncommon Descent . This Feed is for personal non-commercial use only. If you are not reading this material in your news aggregator, the site you are looking at is guilty of copyright infringement UNLESS EXPLICIT PERMISSION OTHERWISE HAS BEEN GIVEN. Please contact legal@uncommondescent.com so we can take legal action immediately.
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Another, more nuanced, look at the Rosalind Franklin story

We’ve all heard the story, probably: That Rosalind Franklin (1920–1958) should have shared the Nobel Prize for the double helix with Francis Crick (1916–2004) and James Watson.

Science writer Nicholas Wade has gone into the story in considerable detail and finds to be much more complex:

In asserting that Franklin was “wrongfully denied authorship” on the Watson and Crick paper, the Lane group seems to believe that she was a junior member of Crick’s laboratory who had a claim on the team’s joint work. In fact, she was leader of a rival team at a different institution. Listing one’s competitors as coauthors on a discovery paper is hardly a common practice…

A problem with the feminist portrayal of Franklin as the robbed heroine is the complete lack of evidence that she viewed herself this way. She was a strong character, independently wealthy, and didn’t hesitate to raise her voice against things she thought unfair, such as being paid less than male researchers. Far from resenting Crick and Watson for their use of her data, she became close friends with Crick, spending her last remission from ovarian cancer in his house. She never once asserted that she had been denied proper credit for her work.

It was obvious that Crick had relied on her DNA data—no other source existed. It was also obvious that he had seen what it meant before she did. Crick told me in an interview in 2003 that Franklin never raised with him the use of her data; there was nothing to say. And she was less passionately interested in DNA than were Watson and Crick, who knew that they were pursuing the secret of life. “Our belief is that she didn’t realize until the structure came out how important DNA was. For her, it was just another problem,” Crick said.

Nicholas Wade, “The Myth of the Wronged Heroine” at City Journal (July 15, 2022)

The whole article is well worth the read for a picture of top tier lab life as it really was at that time. It’s shame that the pussyhats and Handmaids have gotten their talons into Franklin’s legacy but then just being themselves is a fitting punishment — though perhaps a bit too harsh even for them.

Another perspective and some great photos:

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