Is it to late to give her that noble prize? Or at least give her some credit, maybe even a legacy award for people who in their time were underestimated.
Elisa Rosales Unfortunately it isn't awarded to those that are dead, even if they made a huge contribution to a scientific discovery, and I believe a single Noble Prize can't be awarded to more than 3 people. Fortunately Rosalind Franklin is now starting to get the recognition she deserves. She's being mentioned in articles relating to the discovery of DNA and students are learning about her.
Rosalind Franklin is the reason I became interested with biochemistry in the 7th Grade. I have since moved to England, and I am studying to get into University to study Biochemistry and Genetics. Thank you for making a video about her, she deserves it. :)
There is absolutely no question that "Rosie" earned and deserved the Nobel Prize. Knowledge of her Photograph 51 was a key element in the final successful model of the structure of DNA. A blessing on you head Rosie, mozel Tov, mozel tov
That wasn't the end of her career. She also uncovered the structure of a virus for the first time, and her colleague in that work also received the Nobel after her death. However, he at least gave her credit.
As a crystallographer I'd love to see a Scishow episode on crystallography. Despite having the most nobel prizes in a single field and the youngest person every to recieve a nobel prize lots of people still have no idea what it is. Also it's such a pretty science.
Times are changing. The "Watson-Crick were dicks of DNA structure" theme is mostly a sad postscript to the history of culture changing, albeit they were a bit behind their own times. I would hope that the Watson-Crick link would be discredited in Science.
This video made me look smart in class!!! One of my professors asked how the structure of DNA was discovered to which I immediately piped out X-ray crystallography! Booyeah!
My science teacher actually made his point to make us recognise the importance of not-so-well-known contributors in researches. And also pointed out Ms. Franklin was not just a contributor, like, in the test the correct answer to the "Who first deduced the structure of DNA?" had to include her, so good job Mr YY (my teacher)
Ethan A I do not consider a genius quite intentionally putting an exceptional amount of time and effort knowing exactly what she was doing and finding it an accident. When Watson and Crick built an incorrect physical model she instantly found major flaws. Her discovery or confirmation was no accident. If there was any accidental discovery it was Watson's.
I love Rosalind Franklin! I learned about all her contributions to science in high school when we watched an educational video. It seriously pisses me off how she isn't credited enough for her work!
I think she is definitely credited now. The fact you learnt about her in high school is an improvement on the situation when I was at school. Her name was never. mentioned then
What has sexism got to do with it they all worked and collaborated together, and she died before the papper was published and the Nobel prize was awarded. This sort of stuff happens all the time to both man and women
Another great quote from Watson: "The best place for a woman is in someone else's lab." Great guy. He also spent time in the book deriding her mannish clothing and lack of suitable makeup.
Indeed! I am also sad for the fact that men and women diversed from each other by forces of evolution so that women were tied to producing offspring rather than getting to contribute to society in a diffrent way. And I'm also sad that when there was a chance for women to choose the way of contribution, men weren't used to it and hindered their progress.
@@Antropovich Thousands of years ago, most men didn't exactly 'contribute to society'. They were tied to farming or hunting for the mother and offspring.
Rosalind Franklin is the coolest. Probably my favorite scientist. I wish you had also mentioned that she made other great contributions with her research like her work on the structures of the tobacco mosaic virus and the polio virus.
Since taking Biology my sophomore year I've always looked up to Franklin's independence and immense courage. It makes me happy to know there are others who know how important her research was to the discovery of the DNA structure. It's sad not many people know how important she was.
Read both books: "The Double Helix" by Watson and "The Dark Lady of DNA" by Maddox. Awesome accounts of this historical discovery. Even in Watson's own book he expresses Franklin is the key.
Here is another person you should do a story on: Cecelia Payne-Gapsochkin - discovered the hugely important fact that stars are made of helium and hydrogen. Studied at Cambridge 20 years before Rosalind Franklin, but they wouldn't give her a degree at first because she was female. Went on to be the chair of Astronomy Dept at Harvard, but is pretty much unknown
Speaking of Cavendish Lab, could you plz do Great Minds on Henry Cavendish? Eccentric, brilliant, wealthy British scientist who was so pathologically shy that he communicated to his female servants through hand-written notes, rather than talk. He discovered hydrogen, was the first to measure Earth's mass, and formulated fundamental relations in electrical engineering some 50 years before other scientists would discover the same phenomena, independently, since Cavendish rarely published his work.
In my high school Biology class we learned about Franklin before Watson and Crick. My teacher actually hated Watson and Crick but I think he had the right idea essentially giving Franklin the credit because she's the one that actually made the discovery.
Well, I do not hold a degree in quantum mechanics, however without a doubt, I could prove to you the difference between quantum mechanics and human behaviour. In quantum mechanics we provide a mathematical description of what will occur. We can also replicate our experiments, a million times need be, and receive the same results. Uncertainty is an integral part of physics, however this uncertainty is calculated and proven through the use of mathematics, and hence can be proven and replicated.
i get called sexist a lot because i believe in sexual dimorphism and that civilization was built and is maintained by men, but Rosalind Franklin is, in my opinion, one of the most important humans of all time. it's too bad she got cheated out of everything she did and that Watson was such an asshole
ORAORAORAORAORAORAORAORAORAORAORAORAORAORAORAORAORAORAORAORAORAORAORAORAORAORAORAORAORAORAORAORAORA If civilization was built by men, they did it because of their innate superiority over women in capacity for the job. In reality, they did it because they are physically stronger than women, and subjugated women into "their place". Partially at fault additionally was the lack of reliable contraceptives, and a high infant mortality rate. Women were pregnant all the time, and our population was low. As for the maintenance of civilization, of course it's still mostly men. Women have only been liberated and allowed to enter the more advanced fields (in any significant numbers) for about 60 years. Who knows what our civilization will look like in another 60 years. Agreed though, that Franklin was incredible.
Thank you for doing an episode for her Hank. I always thought she deserved more. Also I think her colleagues put her down way too much. Anyway she was pretty awesome!
Thank you for making this video. For this hugely under-appreciated great lady who contributed a whole lot to modern biology. It was unfortunate she didn't receive the Nobel Prize although she deserves it.
I remember reading about her in my bio book in my first year at college, it was my very first time to hear her name. I felt sorry that what she did was only mentioned in a small box, where most students won't even bother to read! my teacher at school never mentioned her when we studied the DNA. She really does deserve more attention! Btw, thanks for the video I have a genetics exam this Saturday, so this kinda came in time :P
Great stuff. I gave a lunch and learn work on molecular biology at work and spent about 5 minutes talking about Franklin and X-ray Crystallography and how her untimely death likely cheated her of the Nobel Prize for discovering the structure of DNA.
Thirty-seven - That makes be sad. I'm a scientist myself, a chemist to be precise, and though I don't think I'll contribute to the world of science nearly as much as she did, I still hope that I will get a few more years than this unfortunate woman did.
Don't be careless with radioactive material! Apparently, Franklin was a little cavalier about that, and radiation exposure may have contributed to her cancer.
Do a video on Andrea Mia Ghez. She is the one who first found black holes at the center of the milky way galaxy thus opening the door to a new research in galaxy formation.
Hey hank! My boyfriend and I recently got diagnosed with hashimoto diseases (oddly enough while we're living abroad in Germany). With what little research I've done on Me. Hashimoto, I've learned that he also was "diagnosed" in Germany too! Maybe do a great minds about him? Orrrr, hashimoto disease in general?! Anyway, love the show! Keep on keepin' on!
Thank you so much for sharing this. she really did deserve more attention. And it's also helpful when oh so many people tell me women did not help science until maybe the last 50 years. so thank you.
Not only did the world deserve more of her she personally did NOT deserve to be over shadowed by the thieving asses that took her work and passed it off as their own.
by the way, I stumbled upon this on wikipedia, about Raymond Gosling who worked with Rosalyn Franklin "He described himself as "a slave in chains" when working for Rosalind Franklin, having previously worked for Maurice Wilkins, on DNA"
A lot of very well known science (and scientists) is/are making discoveries that were imminent. In many fields, that is just the nature of it. Quite often, it is a race to be first (to be published). We still honor those who get in first, even if very deserving (or more deserving) people placed second (or third). It may be impossible to ascertain true "greatness of the mind", a nebulous concept in the first place. We usually go by results.
There is a good movie from the 80s with a very young Jeff Goldblum picturing the events around the discovery of the DNA-structure. It's called "Life Story" (also "Double Helix" or "The Race for the Double Helix").
It was a film made by the BBC science department in fact. With some other great actors as well as Goldblum. The director went on to make Hollywood films, including The Bodyguard with Kevin Costner and Whitney Houston. I once went to a lunch party with one of the other actors in that film, who played a scientist called Max Perutz. I remember his telling me that Goldblum was incredibly eccentric and had a disconcerting technique of reading aloud from a PG Wodehouse novel just before a take and then throwing the book away when the director called "Action!"
Thank you for doing an episode on Franklin - I knew she was involved in discovering the structure of DNA, but I didn't know how and it was interesting to hear more about her work. Please do more episodes on women scientists - it's really inspiring and encouraging for women like myself who have ambitions of establishing careers in science, but are still told that it is a 'male subject' :)
Hey Hank, I just had an idea! You could do a whole series on scientists/inventors that were fucked over or disenfranchised! You could do a video on Tesla, Percy Julian etc A perfect blend of history and science!
From Wikipedia: "By January 1953, Franklin had reconciled her conflicting data, concluding that both DNA forms had two helices, and had started to write a series of three draft manuscripts, two of which included a double helical DNA backbone (see below). Her two A form manuscripts reached Acta Crystallographica in Copenhagen on 6 March 1953,[50] one day before Crick and Watson had completed their model."
I'd love to hear more about Einstein, I kow he is super popular, but he's my favorite :) Mostly because my mother took his quote: "If you want your children to be intelligent, read them fairy tales..." to heart.
How about doing something on Emmy Noether? Noether's theorem was critical in the understanding of conservation laws in many disciplines of physics. She is highly respected by the mathematicians and physicists who know of her work. Lederman and Hill say in their book Symmetry and the Beautiful Universe, that Noether's theorem is "certainly one of the most important mathematical theorems ever proved in guiding the development of modern physics, possibly on a par with the Pythagorean theorem".
How about actually interviewing Jocelyn Bell Burnell about her discovery of the Pulsar and the failure of the Swedish Academy to give her a Nobel Prize having given her supervisor one for her discovery.
Georges Lemaitre deserves a video. He was incredibly important to cosmology and physics as we know it today, having first theorized the Big Bang, and yet barely anybody knows who he is.
Is that true? I think anyone who knows anything about cosmology knows that Lemaitre was one of the first people to propose the idea. A far less known contributor to the field would be Henrietta Swan-Leavitt who discovered the Period-Luminosity Law of Cepheid Variable stars that effectively gave cosmologists a way of measuring the absolute luminosity of stars in distant galaxies. That enabled Hubble to deduce that they were receding and that therefore the Universe was expanding. He wasn't a man to give credit to others but even he thought Swan-Leavitt deserved a Nobel Prize. In the field of DNA research, another unsung hero is Oswald Avery who proved beyond doubt that DNA was the molecule of inheritance. In some respects that was more important than deducing its structure
Scishow, thank you always for the good food for thought... I have a request: Please spotlight Philo T. Farnsworth in your Great Minds series. Philo is seriously underappreciated by the world...
This is a question about stability. In nature, all structures from the molecular to the visible scale will conform to the most stable structure they can. It's the reason cells, and bubbles for that matter, are spherical. DNA is like a long string, and the double helix is similar to string being tied in a braid. A braid is stronger than a string, so for greater strength and stability, DNA becomes a "braid", the double helix. If you want a more in depth explanation, just let me know.
Apparently she didn't realise that it did. From wikipedia, "Watson and Crick were the first to put together all of the scattered fragments of information that were required to produce a successful molecular model of DNA."
We actually learned about Rosalind Franklin in biology class this year as well as Watson and Crick; our teacher taught us a bit of what is in this video.
Actually: "Franklin personally told Crick and Watson that the backbones had to be on the outside, which was crucial since before this both they and Linus Pauling had independently generated non-illuminating models with the chains inside and the bases pointing outwards." Watson admitted it himself: "Of course this presumed that Rosy had hit it right in wanting the bases in the center and the backbone on the outside"
Most schools highlight this fact, I think. Whenever Watson and Crick are discussed, there's usually an emphasis on Franklin as well (usually also discussing how they screwed her over). At least, this is true of the schools in my area.
Rosalind Franklin worked hard for x-ray diffraction. Without her photo-51, other so called genius people can't discover the real structure of DNA molecules. I personally possess a great respect for her efforts.
It would be incredible if you could do Georges Lemaître, father of the Big Bang theory, Hubble's law and the theory of the expansion of the Universe. ("Your calculations are correct, but your physics is atrocious." -A. Einstein on Lemaître's theory of an expanding universe)
you could do a little introduction about The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco. This book was written about truly found stuff, I don't really know much about it, but I heard, that the scrips or letters (which are the main reason the book was written) were real.
I only just found from this that Maurice Wilkins was a man.... I am so glad I didn't go on much longer without that knowledge, which my school or the 2013 Times article didn't mention; thank-you scishow... (And great video! :) )
It's not the main reason, without the knowledge that the ratios of Adenine and thymine, and guanine and cytosine were equivalent, the structure would have been very different, so we also need to give much more credit to Erwin Chargaff. This knowledge and Franklin's discovery both helped to confirm the helical structure, and to form the model that we know today.
From Wikipedia: "Unpublished drafts of her papers...show that she had independently determined the overall B-form of the DNA helix and the location of the phosphate groups on the outside of the structure. Moreover, Franklin personally told Crick and Watson that the backbones had to be on the outside, which was crucial since before this both they and Linus Pauling had independently generated non-illuminating models with the chains inside and the bases pointing outwards."
Totally different from this topic, but it would be really awesome if you did a video on Ted Fujita. (The man who created the F-scale for tornadoes.) He was the original storm chaser and just an amazing guy. I wish more people knew about him.
Amazing story, poor Rosalind Franklin but what an amazing scientist! Actually, if she's British that would mean she'd be a perfect contender for the person to go on the new five pound notes to replace Elizabeth Fry.
I'm not sure how much you could do on it, but have you looked into Imhotep? He was around thousands of years before medicine really came into practice on the northern side of the Mediterranean Sea, so he probably deserves a mention as the father of medicine. He was also the guy who crafted the shape of the pyramids, and a bunch of other crazy things. Probably the smartest man alive in his time, and for the next few thousand years.
At my old school in Cambridgeshire they have a lab named after Rosalind Franklin. I'm proud or my old school for recognising such an unlucky but awesome person.
I'd love to see a Great Minds on John Harrison, the carpenter/clockmaker whose life was the subject of Dava Sobel's AWESOME book "Longitude". If that video never surfaces, may I suggest everyone who hasn't yet read the book. Dava Sobel's ability to take a potentially boring and sluggish story and make it hard to put down as a historic novel is unmatched. Write more Dava! :-)
I love this series, Hank! Especially the run of women in science videos you are currently doing. Science history, as with most history, has ignored the contributions of great women and I really appreciate seeing these stories brought out of the academic canon and into the public eye.
For the love of all that is holy, please do an episode of Scishow talking about Dawn and New Horizons and the study of dwarf planets in our solar system. The next few years are going to do amazing things for our knowledge of Pluto, Ceres, and probably other Kuiper belt objects.
So that is a slightly misleading quote. She had the backbone right, but she had the rest of the structure wrong. She hypothesised that the purine and pyrimidine bases were facing the outside of the molecule, and not facing inwards. This meant that she was unaware of complementary base pairing, which is the most important feature of the structure of DNA and the truly key finding that Watson and Crick published. The data she contributed was still incredibly important though!
The 1987 TV movie "Life Story" starring Jeff Goldblum seems to depict her fairly well, and definitely gives her credit for the contributions she made to the discovery of the structure of DNA.
Is it to late to give her that noble prize? Or at least give her some credit, maybe even a legacy award for people who in their time were underestimated.
Elisa Rosales
Unfortunately it isn't awarded to those that are dead, even if they made a huge contribution to a scientific discovery, and I believe a single Noble Prize can't be awarded to more than 3 people.
Fortunately Rosalind Franklin is now starting to get the recognition she deserves. She's being mentioned in articles relating to the discovery of DNA and students are learning about her.
@@redcheck4624
I think people are now talking about Watson, Crick and Franklin when DNA is discussed.
🎯🥊🇨🇦🌐
She deserve 3 noble prize
1. For the face mask
2. For the structure of DNA
3. For the structure of viruses.
But she must have stolen it from someone else. So go and find *_him_* first.
Rosalind Franklin is the reason I became interested with biochemistry in the 7th Grade. I have since moved to England, and I am studying to get into University to study Biochemistry and Genetics. Thank you for making a video about her, she deserves it. :)
There is absolutely no question that "Rosie" earned and deserved the Nobel Prize. Knowledge of her Photograph 51 was a key element in the final successful model of the structure of DNA. A blessing on you head Rosie, mozel Tov, mozel tov
? You mean Raymond Gosling's photo 51, surely? The photo the Watson and Crick didn't have access to until the month after they solved the structure.
That wasn't the end of her career. She also uncovered the structure of a virus for the first time, and her colleague in that work also received the Nobel after her death. However, he at least gave her credit.
As a crystallographer I'd love to see a Scishow episode on crystallography. Despite having the most nobel prizes in a single field and the youngest person every to recieve a nobel prize lots of people still have no idea what it is. Also it's such a pretty science.
All I can think of is an incapacitated Hank collecting precious gems that he buys on the internet.
Seems cool
This is a sad story =/, poor Rosalind.
No. (4 years later)
Mushroom Flow Yes. (3 days later)
Times are changing. The "Watson-Crick were dicks of DNA structure" theme is mostly a sad postscript to the history of culture changing, albeit they were a bit behind their own times. I would hope that the Watson-Crick link would be discredited in Science.
The truth always comes out, eventually.
This video made me look smart in class!!! One of my professors asked how the structure of DNA was discovered to which I immediately piped out X-ray crystallography! Booyeah!
Thank you for putting the spotlight on lesser-known scientists like Rosalind Franklin.
Whenever I see Watson and/or Crick mentioned in a textbook, I cross it out with red ink and write Rosalind Franklin on top of it.
My science teacher actually made his point to make us recognise the importance of not-so-well-known contributors in researches. And also pointed out Ms. Franklin was not just a contributor, like, in the test the correct answer to the "Who first deduced the structure of DNA?" had to include her, so good job Mr YY (my teacher)
She accidentally found the double-helix.
She died not knowing what she accidentally found.
Yeah, but nonetheless it was a great contribution, one worth remembering
If she didn't take the picture, Watson and Crick wouldn't have found out until much later. So yes, she's a key contributor
Andrea Cussolotto
Ethan A I do not consider a genius quite intentionally putting an exceptional amount of time and effort knowing exactly what she was doing and finding it an accident. When Watson and Crick built an incorrect physical model she instantly found major flaws. Her discovery or confirmation was no accident. If there was any accidental discovery it was Watson's.
I love Rosalind Franklin! I learned about all her contributions to science in high school when we watched an educational video. It seriously pisses me off how she isn't credited enough for her work!
I think she is definitely credited now. The fact you learnt about her in high school is an improvement on the situation when I was at school. Her name was never. mentioned then
Scishow: correcting the sexist mistakes of the past and giving the great women some credit and recognition among the new generation. Good work.
What has sexism got to do with it they all worked and collaborated together, and she died before the papper was published and the Nobel prize was awarded. This sort of stuff happens all the time to both man and women
Another great quote from Watson: "The best place for a woman is in someone else's lab." Great guy. He also spent time in the book deriding her mannish clothing and lack of suitable makeup.
I love the fact that almost half of the great minds you guys chose to present are woman! Good job on not perpetuating gender stereotypes! way to go
Indeed! I am also sad for the fact that men and women diversed from each other by forces of evolution so that women were tied to producing offspring rather than getting to contribute to society in a diffrent way. And I'm also sad that when there was a chance for women to choose the way of contribution, men weren't used to it and hindered their progress.
@@Antropovich Thousands of years ago, most men didn't exactly 'contribute to society'. They were tied to farming or hunting for the mother and offspring.
Rosalind Franklin is the coolest. Probably my favorite scientist. I wish you had also mentioned that she made other great contributions with her research like her work on the structures of the tobacco mosaic virus and the polio virus.
In my Biology education, the teacher barely mentioned Watson and Crick and focussed almost entirely on Rosalind Franklin. Which is great!
Since taking Biology my sophomore year I've always looked up to Franklin's independence and immense courage. It makes me happy to know there are others who know how important her research was to the discovery of the DNA structure. It's sad not many people know how important she was.
Archimedes! The actual inventor of calculus (though Newton didn't rip him off; his works were lost at the time of Newton.)!
"The world deserved more than 37 years of rosalind franklin", what a nice thing to say hank, awesome work, keep it up
Read both books: "The Double Helix" by Watson and "The Dark Lady of DNA" by Maddox. Awesome accounts of this historical discovery. Even in Watson's own book he expresses Franklin is the key.
AWESOME woman--Strong female leaders in the sciences are SO inspiring. Thanks for sharing, SciShow, she deserves all the credit we can give.
Nikola Tesla! That would be an awesome story..
Here is another person you should do a story on: Cecelia Payne-Gapsochkin - discovered the hugely important fact that stars are made of helium and hydrogen. Studied at Cambridge 20 years before Rosalind Franklin, but they wouldn't give her a degree at first because she was female. Went on to be the chair of Astronomy Dept at Harvard, but is pretty much unknown
You should do a great minds episode on one of the following Native Americans: John Herrington, Mary Ross, Dr. Jani Ingram or Dr. David Burgess
Thank you Hank Green! You're making my BIO 101 understandable! Thank God for you and your mind!!!! Keep up your greatness, the world needs you!!!!
HAPPY BIRTHDAY! ROSALIND :-)
How sad that we never heard of her. Well, *I* hadn't heard of her. Thanks for shining the spotlight on forgotten heroes and heroines.
It would be great to see a video on Copernicus or Galileo.
yeah, it would
Speaking of Cavendish Lab, could you plz do Great Minds on Henry Cavendish? Eccentric, brilliant, wealthy British scientist who was so pathologically shy that he communicated to his female servants through hand-written notes, rather than talk. He discovered hydrogen, was the first to measure Earth's mass, and formulated fundamental relations in electrical engineering some 50 years before other scientists would discover the same phenomena, independently, since Cavendish rarely published his work.
Would love a video on John Nash.
In my high school Biology class we learned about Franklin before Watson and Crick. My teacher actually hated Watson and Crick but I think he had the right idea essentially giving Franklin the credit because she's the one that actually made the discovery.
❤
A video on Issac Newton
Well, I do not hold a degree in quantum mechanics, however without a doubt, I could prove to you the difference between quantum mechanics and human behaviour. In quantum mechanics we provide a mathematical description of what will occur. We can also replicate our experiments, a million times need be, and receive the same results. Uncertainty is an integral part of physics, however this uncertainty is calculated and proven through the use of mathematics, and hence can be proven and replicated.
i get called sexist a lot because i believe in sexual dimorphism and that civilization was built and is maintained by men, but Rosalind Franklin is, in my opinion, one of the most important humans of all time. it's too bad she got cheated out of everything she did and that Watson was such an asshole
ORAORAORAORAORAORAORAORAORAORAORAORAORAORAORAORAORAORAORAORAORAORAORAORAORAORAORAORAORAORAORAORAORA If civilization was built by men, they did it because of their innate superiority over women in capacity for the job. In reality, they did it because they are physically stronger than women, and subjugated women into "their place". Partially at fault additionally was the lack of reliable contraceptives, and a high infant mortality rate. Women were pregnant all the time, and our population was low.
As for the maintenance of civilization, of course it's still mostly men. Women have only been liberated and allowed to enter the more advanced fields (in any significant numbers) for about 60 years. Who knows what our civilization will look like in another 60 years.
Agreed though, that Franklin was incredible.
+DJ Grumbles Actually, I doubt that civilization was built by men very much. As I reckon most people who actually study history professionally do.
ORAORAORAORAORAORAORAORAORAORAORAORAORAORAORAORAORAORAORAORAORAORAORAORAORAORAORAORAORAORAORAORAORA Nice name
But if men built civilisation what did women do?
I'm so glad you featured Rosalind Franklin! She is one of my inspirations :).
In honor of Women's History Month, how about one on Barbara McClintock and her work that led her to discover the process of transposition?
Thanks you for featuring her! I usually tell my students about her contribution and highlight the injustice of her not getting any credit at all.
Michael Faraday (if I spelled that right)
You did
Thank you for doing an episode for her Hank. I always thought she deserved more. Also I think her colleagues put her down way too much. Anyway she was pretty awesome!
More of these need to be done, and do Bill Gates or some people that are still alive today :)
Like Stephen Hawking.
Oh well
Thank you for making this video. For this hugely under-appreciated great lady who contributed a whole lot to modern biology. It was unfortunate she didn't receive the Nobel Prize although she deserves it.
I remember reading about her in my bio book in my first year at college, it was my very first time to hear her name. I felt sorry that what she did was only mentioned in a small box, where most students won't even bother to read! my teacher at school never mentioned her when we studied the DNA.
She really does deserve more attention!
Btw, thanks for the video I have a genetics exam this Saturday, so this kinda came in time :P
Great stuff. I gave a lunch and learn work on molecular biology at work and spent about 5 minutes talking about Franklin and X-ray Crystallography and how her untimely death likely cheated her of the Nobel Prize for discovering the structure of DNA.
It also cheated the world of a great scientist. She did important work after her research on DNA.
Thirty-seven - That makes be sad. I'm a scientist myself, a chemist to be precise, and though I don't think I'll contribute to the world of science nearly as much as she did, I still hope that I will get a few more years than this unfortunate woman did.
Don't be careless with radioactive material! Apparently, Franklin was a little cavalier about that, and radiation exposure may have contributed to her cancer.
Do a video on Andrea Mia Ghez. She is the one who first found black holes at the center of the milky way galaxy thus opening the door to a new research in galaxy formation.
You should do Lev Landau for one of these episodes. One of the greatest Physicists of all time and only really known by Physicists.
Hey hank! My boyfriend and I recently got diagnosed with hashimoto diseases (oddly enough while we're living abroad in Germany). With what little research I've done on Me. Hashimoto, I've learned that he also was "diagnosed" in Germany too! Maybe do a great minds about him? Orrrr, hashimoto disease in general?! Anyway, love the show! Keep on keepin' on!
Thank you so much for sharing this. she really did deserve more attention. And it's also helpful when oh so many people tell me women did not help science until maybe the last 50 years. so thank you.
Not only did the world deserve more of her she personally did NOT deserve to be over shadowed by the thieving asses that took her work and passed it off as their own.
by the way, I stumbled upon this on wikipedia, about Raymond Gosling who worked with Rosalyn Franklin "He described himself as "a slave in chains" when working for Rosalind Franklin, having previously worked for Maurice Wilkins, on DNA"
A lot of very well known science (and scientists) is/are making discoveries that were imminent. In many fields, that is just the nature of it. Quite often, it is a race to be first (to be published).
We still honor those who get in first, even if very deserving (or more deserving) people placed second (or third).
It may be impossible to ascertain true "greatness of the mind", a nebulous concept in the first place. We usually go by results.
There is a good movie from the 80s with a very young Jeff Goldblum picturing the events around the discovery of the DNA-structure. It's called "Life Story" (also "Double Helix" or "The Race for the Double Helix").
It was a film made by the BBC science department in fact. With some other great actors as well as Goldblum.
The director went on to make Hollywood films, including The Bodyguard with Kevin Costner and Whitney Houston.
I once went to a lunch party with one of the other actors in that film, who played a scientist called Max Perutz. I remember his telling me that Goldblum was incredibly eccentric and had a disconcerting technique of reading aloud from a PG Wodehouse novel just before a take and then throwing the book away when the director called "Action!"
Thank you for doing an episode on Franklin - I knew she was involved in discovering the structure of DNA, but I didn't know how and it was interesting to hear more about her work. Please do more episodes on women scientists - it's really inspiring and encouraging for women like myself who have ambitions of establishing careers in science, but are still told that it is a 'male subject' :)
Thank you for this video. =) Everyone should know who Rosalind Franklin is and her contributions to science.
Do one about : Anthoni van leeuwenhoek( the inventor the microscope) It would be great to see something about one of the most important inventors!
Hey Hank, I just had an idea! You could do a whole series on scientists/inventors that were fucked over or disenfranchised! You could do a video on Tesla, Percy Julian etc
A perfect blend of history and science!
From Wikipedia:
"By January 1953, Franklin had reconciled her conflicting data, concluding that both DNA forms had two helices, and had started to write a series of three draft manuscripts, two of which included a double helical DNA backbone (see below). Her two A form manuscripts reached Acta Crystallographica in Copenhagen on 6 March 1953,[50] one day before Crick and Watson had completed their model."
I'd love to hear more about Einstein, I kow he is super popular, but he's my favorite :)
Mostly because my mother took his quote: "If you want your children to be intelligent, read them fairy tales..." to heart.
I think that you should talk about Clodomiro Picado. He was an absolute genius!
How about doing something on Emmy Noether? Noether's theorem was critical in the understanding of conservation laws in many disciplines of physics. She is highly respected by the mathematicians and physicists who know of her work. Lederman and Hill say in their book Symmetry and the Beautiful Universe, that Noether's theorem is "certainly one of the most important mathematical theorems ever proved in guiding the development of modern physics, possibly on a par with the Pythagorean theorem".
How about actually interviewing Jocelyn Bell Burnell about her discovery of the Pulsar and the failure of the Swedish Academy to give her a Nobel Prize having given her supervisor one for her discovery.
That was appalling. But her astonishing lack of bitterness about it is incredibly inspiring.
Georges Lemaitre deserves a video. He was incredibly important to cosmology and physics as we know it today, having first theorized the Big Bang, and yet barely anybody knows who he is.
Is that true? I think anyone who knows anything about cosmology knows that Lemaitre was one of the first people to propose the idea. A far less known contributor to the field would be Henrietta Swan-Leavitt who discovered the Period-Luminosity Law of Cepheid Variable stars that effectively gave cosmologists a way of measuring the absolute luminosity of stars in distant galaxies. That enabled Hubble to deduce that they were receding and that therefore the Universe was expanding. He wasn't a man to give credit to others but even he thought Swan-Leavitt deserved a Nobel Prize.
In the field of DNA research, another unsung hero is Oswald Avery who proved beyond doubt that DNA was the molecule of inheritance. In some respects that was more important than deducing its structure
Scishow, thank you always for the good food for thought...
I have a request: Please spotlight Philo T. Farnsworth in your Great Minds series. Philo is seriously underappreciated by the world...
Absolutely one of the biggest injustice in the history of scientific discoveries. The world deserves to know more about Rosalind Franklin.
Probably just one of many injustices. And it's worth pointing out that the main reason she didn't get the Nobel Prize was that she was dead.
This is a question about stability. In nature, all structures from the molecular to the visible scale will conform to the most stable structure they can. It's the reason cells, and bubbles for that matter, are spherical. DNA is like a long string, and the double helix is similar to string being tied in a braid. A braid is stronger than a string, so for greater strength and stability, DNA becomes a "braid", the double helix. If you want a more in depth explanation, just let me know.
You guys should do a Great Minds on Zephram Cochrane or one on Tobias Fleming Shaw and Wallace Fujikawa.
Finally! I've been waiting for this video for so long. Thanks, Scishow!
Apparently she didn't realise that it did. From wikipedia, "Watson and Crick were the first to put together all of the scattered fragments of information that were required to produce a successful molecular model of DNA."
We actually learned about Rosalind Franklin in biology class this year as well as Watson and Crick; our teacher taught us a bit of what is in this video.
Actually:
"Franklin personally told Crick and Watson that the backbones had to be on the outside, which was crucial since before this both they and Linus Pauling had independently generated non-illuminating models with the chains inside and the bases pointing outwards."
Watson admitted it himself:
"Of course this presumed that Rosy had hit it right in wanting the bases in the center and the backbone on the outside"
Most schools highlight this fact, I think. Whenever Watson and Crick are discussed, there's usually an emphasis on Franklin as well (usually also discussing how they screwed her over). At least, this is true of the schools in my area.
Great Minds is my favorite scishow segment! thank you guys for your amazing work! :D
Rosalind Franklin deserves a noble prize for her amazing work.
She does. But they don't give it to dead poeople
Another hero! thanks for these Great Minds episodes. Love them all!
Rosalind Franklin worked hard for x-ray diffraction. Without her photo-51, other so called genius people can't discover the real structure of DNA molecules. I personally possess a great respect for her efforts.
It would be incredible if you could do Georges Lemaître, father of the Big Bang theory, Hubble's law and the theory of the expansion of the Universe.
("Your calculations are correct, but your physics is atrocious." -A. Einstein on Lemaître's theory of an expanding universe)
same of mine! she said it was part of her life's work to tell everyone of rosalind franklin's work
you could do a little introduction about The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco. This book was written about truly found stuff, I don't really know much about it, but I heard, that the scrips or letters (which are the main reason the book was written) were real.
I only just found from this that Maurice Wilkins was a man.... I am so glad I didn't go on much longer without that knowledge, which my school or the 2013 Times article didn't mention; thank-you scishow...
(And great video! :) )
It's not the main reason, without the knowledge that the ratios of Adenine and thymine, and guanine and cytosine were equivalent, the structure would have been very different, so we also need to give much more credit to Erwin Chargaff.
This knowledge and Franklin's discovery both helped to confirm the helical structure, and to form the model that we know today.
I watched 30 sci show episodes in the past hour. That's enough sci show for today...
They already did a Great Minds on Tesla. In case you missed you can find it in the Great Minds playlist.
From Wikipedia:
"Unpublished drafts of her papers...show that she had independently determined the overall B-form of the DNA helix and the location of the phosphate groups on the outside of the structure. Moreover, Franklin personally told Crick and Watson that the backbones had to be on the outside, which was crucial since before this both they and Linus Pauling had independently generated non-illuminating models with the chains inside and the bases pointing outwards."
Totally different from this topic, but it would be really awesome if you did a video on Ted Fujita. (The man who created the F-scale for tornadoes.) He was the original storm chaser and just an amazing guy. I wish more people knew about him.
Amazing story, poor Rosalind Franklin but what an amazing scientist! Actually, if she's British that would mean she'd be a perfect contender for the person to go on the new five pound notes to replace Elizabeth Fry.
I'm not sure how much you could do on it, but have you looked into Imhotep? He was around thousands of years before medicine really came into practice on the northern side of the Mediterranean Sea, so he probably deserves a mention as the father of medicine. He was also the guy who crafted the shape of the pyramids, and a bunch of other crazy things. Probably the smartest man alive in his time, and for the next few thousand years.
Hi Hank, Can you do an episode on Sir Jagadish Chandra Bose, Phil Zimmermann, Kautilya & Aryabhata. Thank you :)
Make a video about Srinivasa Ramanujam☺.He is one of the greatest mathematician of all time
At my old school in Cambridgeshire they have a lab named after Rosalind Franklin. I'm proud or my old school for recognising such an unlucky but awesome person.
Curse that rule of not awarding the Nobel Prize posthumously! Rosalind Franklin deserves that award and more!
I'd love to see a Great Minds on John Harrison, the carpenter/clockmaker whose life was the subject of Dava Sobel's AWESOME book "Longitude". If that video never surfaces, may I suggest everyone who hasn't yet read the book. Dava Sobel's ability to take a potentially boring and sluggish story and make it hard to put down as a historic novel is unmatched. Write more Dava! :-)
Learn something EVERYDAY ... THANKS Scishow!!!
Thank you for talking about her! Amazing woman.
I love this series, Hank! Especially the run of women in science videos you are currently doing. Science history, as with most history, has ignored the contributions of great women and I really appreciate seeing these stories brought out of the academic canon and into the public eye.
There's a play called Photograph 51 about Rosalind Franklin.
It's pretty fascinating.
For the love of all that is holy, please do an episode of Scishow talking about Dawn and New Horizons and the study of dwarf planets in our solar system. The next few years are going to do amazing things for our knowledge of Pluto, Ceres, and probably other Kuiper belt objects.
Can you please do a great minds episode about Henry Cavendish.
So that is a slightly misleading quote. She had the backbone right, but she had the rest of the structure wrong. She hypothesised that the purine and pyrimidine bases were facing the outside of the molecule, and not facing inwards. This meant that she was unaware of complementary base pairing, which is the most important feature of the structure of DNA and the truly key finding that Watson and Crick published. The data she contributed was still incredibly important though!
The 1987 TV movie "Life Story" starring Jeff Goldblum seems to depict her fairly well, and definitely gives her credit for the contributions she made to the discovery of the structure of DNA.