Genetics Assignment #4

Writing assignment #4

The film “The Race for the Double Helix” starts out with James Watson talking about DNA and how whoever can figure it out would be famous and win a Nobel Prize.  James Crick ends up in Cambridge for a research position and meets Francis Crick at the university. Francis Crick was a student at the university studying hemoglobin but found that DNA was a common interest among him and James Watson who both had similar theories. Watson and Crick both believed the genetic code for life was contained in DNA and wanted to create a 3D model of the DNA structure. Watson and Crick attempted their first DNA structure which was a failure and was somewhat mocked by the scientific community. The person in charge of Watson and Crick at the university told them to stop fooling around in another scientist’s research and wanted them to go back to what they each were supposed to be focusing on. 

            At the same time Rosalind Franklin was working on DNA and seemed to be struggling with not being taken seriously by the male dominated scientific community. She was working with Maurice Wilkins who either wanted to steal her work or just make her look bad, possibly both. She was focusing on A Form of DNA but he wanted to work on the B form because the pictures were better quality. At one-point, Wilkins shows Watson the photo of the B form of DNA and it helps confirm for Watson and Crick that DNA is helical in structure and is a double helix. Watson and Crick are able to get approval by their superior at Cambridge to attempt another model and to get appropriately made pieces for their model. During construction of the model, Crick is able to use knowledge from his hemoglobin research to conclude that the DNA strands must run antiparallel to each other. This enables them to complete their model which luckily is correct and they end up winning the Nobel Prize. 

            In the film, the common office supply that Francis Crick used to demonstrate that DNA is antiparallel were two pencils. They were brown in color so I do not know if they were normal pencils or brown colored pencils, but they were pencils. 

            For DNA structure, antiparallel means that the two molecules are side by side but are running in opposite directions of each-other so that the head of one DNA strand is always laying against the tail end of the other DNA strand. In the film, Jerry Donahue tells Watson that they are using the wrong form of the nitrogenous bases which allows Watson and Crick to pair them properly.