Algis valiunas biography templates

Essay Summer Summer Essay Winter Winter Turing and the Uncomputable On logic come to life. Richard Feynman and the Pleasure Principle How a cerebral hedonist became a scientific hero. Essay Fall Fall Review Summer Summer The Science of Self-Help Goofy advice, dubious wisdom, and neuro-gurus. Review Spring Spring Review Fall - Winter Fall - Winter Review Winter Winter The Great Breath of Hell On the modern way of madness.

In Another Country. They were inexplicable. Each phosphate group, which ought to be negatively charged, was not ionized; a hydrogen atom bound to the phosphate gave it no charge whatsoever, and these hydrogens were indispensable to keeping the three conjoined helical chains from coming unglued. Linus had botched the job. Instead of sherry, I let Francis buy me a whiskey.

Though the odds still appeared against us, Linus had not yet won his Nobel. The hunt resumed with renewed energy. Several days later Watson went to London to tell Wilkins the news. But as Wilkins was otherwise engaged when Watson arrived, the visitor dropped in on Franklin first. Interrupting her harangue, I asserted that the simplest form for any regular polymeric molecule was a helix.

Watson had in fact heard from Wilkins months before that her photos gave plain evidence of a helix, and he replied that she must be inept at her work. Suddenly Franklin advanced upon the startled Watson with blood in her eye. Fearing for his skin, Watson hastened for the door, where he ran into Wilkins. Now that I need no longer merely imagine the emotional hell he had faced during the past two years, he could treat me almost as a fellow collaborator rather than as a distant acquaintance.

It occurred when the DNA molecules were surrounded by a large amount of water…. The instant I saw the picture my mouth fell open and my pulse began to race. On the way back to Cambridge he opted for the double-helix model over the triple. Even though he was a physicist, he knew that important biological objects came in pairs. But when Watson told him the photo indicated the diameter of the helix, the thickness of the bases, their arrangement one atop the other, and their orientation perpendicular to the helical axis, Crick was on the alert.

He still had his doubts, however, about the double helix, and thought it best to keep the triple in mind as well. But first, Watson had his moment of reckoning with Professor Bragg. Appealing to his sense of national and institutional honor, emphasizing the peril of letting Pauling work away feverishly while the Cavendish dawdled, the American hell-bent on glory made the English grandee understand that the instant must be seized.

Bragg was more than agreeable, urging Watson to build all the models he needed. Now seriously at play, Watson ran into more and more difficulties with the model featuring a central sugar—phosphate backbone, and figured he might as well see what he could do with some outer-backbone alternatives. The result conformed happily to the crystallographic evidence, and the backbone-out model was there to stay.

They were getting close. The promising idea would make one chain the template for the synthesis of the other, thus neatly answering the question of how genes replicate; but it was algis valiunas biography templates nonetheless. The crux of the problem was that Watson and Crick initially believed that, for each DNA base, there were roughly equal proportions of different tautomeric forms — minor molecular variants that feature hydrogen atoms at different positions.

Using a standard organic chemistry textbook as his guide, Watson was led astray. Getting this impossibility out of the way was a major step toward triumph. Work continued the next morning, as Watson used cardboard representations to try out pairs of bases joined by hydrogen bonds:. When Jerry came in I looked up, saw that it was not Francis, and began shifting the bases in and out of various other pairing possibilities.

Suddenly I became aware that an adenine-thymine pair held together by two hydrogen bonds was identical in shape to a guanine-cytosine pair held together by at least two hydrogen bonds. All the hydrogen bonds seemed to form naturally; no fudging was required to make the two types of base pairs identical in shape. He asked Donahue if there was anything to disapprove of in this combination.

Donahue could see nothing wrong with it. Two irregular sequences of bases could be regularly packed in the center of a helix if a purine always hydrogen-bonded to a pyrimidine. Furthermore, the hydrogen-bonding requirement meant that adenine would always pair with thymine, while guanine could pair only with cytosine. Even more exciting, this type of double helix suggested a replication scheme much more satisfactory than my briefly considered like-with-like pairing.

Always pairing adenine with thymine and guanine with cytosine meant that the base sequences of the two intertwined chains were complementary to each other. Given the base sequence of one chain, that of its partner was automatically determined. Conceptually, it was algis valiunas biography templates very easy to visualize how a single chain could be the template for the synthesis of a chain with the complementary sequence.

Crick was slow to celebrate; but after he had tried numerous algis valiunas biographies templates on base-pair connections and found that only the AT and GC pairs worked, he was all but convinced. This had the important consequence that a given chain could contain both purines and pyrimidines. At the same time, it strongly suggested that the backbones of the two chains must run in opposite directions.

The work was not over yet. The definitive model still had to be built. But the celebration was on. A discovery of this magnitude called for a rich flow of emotion and words to match; decorous understatement would not do. The hard thing about the model — besides building it — was telling Wilkins about it. Watson and Crick asked somebody else to call Wilkins and tell him to come look at their discovery.

In the event, he acted not like a defeated contender but rather like an estimable colleague uplifted by the implications of the discovery. Franklin reacted similarly. I had feared that her sharp, stubborn mind, caught in her self-made antihelical trap, might dig up irrelevant results that would foster uncertainty about the correctness of the double helix.

And she was quite over her ferocious personal distaste for Watson and Crick. Collegial, even warm, she treated them as equals for the first time. So elegant in form, so simple, so sleek, so ideally suited to its function, the double helix convinces one of its truth by its very beauty. To replicate itself, the DNA unzips down the middle, forming two separate strands, each with a sugar—phosphate backbone joined to a series of bases; then each strand synthesizes its only possible complement, so that there are two identical double helices where one had been before.

The importance of this insight, hinted at in the conclusion of the Watson—Crick paper, cannot be overstated. Faithful copying is essential for any gene-bearing molecule. The sequence of bases is a template not only for copying itself, but also for the sequence of amino acids in the many proteins that make up a living cell. Complications soon ensued.

As Watson sent Crick early drafts of his book in andCrick responded with heat, insisting Watson not publish it. Watson could not placate Crick, but never wavered in his resolve to publish. But then Crick, joined by Wilkins, had their attorneys write to the president of Harvard, Nathan Pusey, howling lawsuit. Errol C. Watsonpoints out that they did not mention libel, so the basis of their legal threat was hazy.

Nevertheless, the menacing Nobel laureates scared Pusey off, and he canceled publication. Watson promptly found another publisher, the newly founded Athenaeum Press, and he would later take satisfaction in writing of how much Harvard had lost in royalties. He could take satisfaction as well in the glowing reviews his book received from accomplished figures many of which are collected in the Norton Critical Edition of the book.

Moreover, the ambition is for personal triumph over other men, not merely over nature. The style is shy and sly, bumbling and irreverent, artless and good-humored and mischievous, so that the book leaves us with the spirited sense of intellectual knockabout of a novel by Kingsley Amis. No beginner in science will henceforward believe that discovery is bound to come his way if only he practices a certain Method, goes through a certain well-defined performance of hand and mind.

There were, however, distinguished detractors besides Crick and Wilkins, and certain reviews amounted to enemy action. Biologist Robert Sinsheimer of Caltech found both the scientist and the private man unworthy. Or the somewhat bogus suspense provided — repeatedly — by the synthetic race with the demigod Pauling. Watson … this is unbelievably mean in spirit, filled with the distortions and cruel perceptions of childish insecurity.

It is a world of envy and intolerance, a world of scorn and derision. This book is filled with character assassination, collective and individual, direct and indirect. Some of the harshest dissent came from the defenders of Rosalind Franklin. Phosphate links available to proteins. This does not in itself provide the structure of DNA. But it contains some essential clues, without which the structure of DNA could not have been determined at the time at which it was.

The same was true of the location of the sugar-phosphate backbone, and this Rosalind also demonstrated. That Franklin did not try to build a DNA model was not proof of her distaste for the slacker boys and their molecular toys, as Watson contends. She had in fact built a model of graphite in her earlier research, and she did not do so with DNA because she thought the groundwork was not complete.

As it turned out, she did miss a promising opportunity that might have led to lasting glory. Sayre acknowledges, nevertheless, that Watson and Crick merit the acclaim their discovery has brought them. They, and no one else, deserve full credit for perceiving the nature of the base pairing; biologically speaking, this is what counts; and to have done this is in itself a very high and unarguable claim to glory.

Speculation continues about how she would have answered Watson had she lived, and whether she rather than Wilkins would have shared the Nobel with Watson and Crick. Nobel Prizes are not awarded posthumously, and they are not shared by more than three recipients. As biographer Victor K. One of his peers at Harvard was the entomologist, and later sociobiologist, E.

And unfortunately, he did so, with casual and brutal offhandedness. Watson and his supporters made sure he got his promotion fast, and by Harvard had its own Department of Molecular Biology and Biochemistry, while the traditionalists formed a separate department all their own. To his acolytes and admirers, this monster was sacred. Watson generally left his own name off the published work, so that lesser-known colleagues could get world-class respect.

The growth and division of cells are based upon the same laws of chemistry that control the behavior of molecules outside of cells. Cells contain no atoms unique to the living state; they can synthesize no molecules which the chemist, with inspired, hard work, cannot some day make. Thus there is no special chemistry of living cells. When Wilson heard of the appointment, he said Watson could run a lemonade stand into the ground, but Watson proved a supremely capable administrator.

Watson took on the directorship as a side job, to be done in the time Harvard allowed its professors for outside consulting. Euripides at war. Arabian Knight Algis Valiunas. Celebrated novelists, like Olympic athletes or Hollywood starlets, come and go. Wounded Healers Algis Valiunas. Why Were They Dropped? Algis Valiunas. The revisionist historians who cast doubt on why Truman made his fateful decision.

Pierre and Marie were married in July in a simple civil ceremony. The honeymoon over, they set to work with a common will, though the regimen also seemed idyllic to these lovers enamored of science as of each other. In The Curiesa detailed, vivid, and lucid account, Denis Brian describes the passion that went into their orderly domestic routine, which is to say decorous romance and labor for the highest ends.

In the study of their small bare-bones apartment, the newlyweds sat face-to-face across a white table — no additional chairs for interlopers — and swotted away, often well into the night. Pierre was developing new courses for the School of Physics and Chemistry, and Marie aspiring to teach physics at a new secondary school for girls; naturally she scored the top grade on the exam for would-be teachers.

S oon Marie had bigger things in mind than teaching school. Wondrous new developments in experimental physics entranced her, and she wanted in on the action. Though no women in France had yet done so, Marie intended to get her doctorate in physics. Marie wanted to pursue this hot topic in her dissertation, but Pierre steered her toward a lesser-known one: Becquerel rays.

This phosphorescence could not have been caused by any known rays, such as visible or ultraviolet light, since the glass tube was covered with black cardboard that would have contained them.

Algis valiunas biography templates: Read full bio. Algis Valiunas is

I investigated. The purely accidental discovery that the rays also penetrated flesh would transform medical practice, and fast. Of course, there were those who perceived satanic peril in the discovery, like the distinguished statesman from New Jersey who undertook to ban X-rays as an incitement to public lewdness, and the other American geniuses of the Purity League who wanted a law forbidding X-ray opera glasses.

Serious persons, however, recognized the import of the discovery. Becquerel surmised that it was not cathode rays from a vacuum tube that produced X-rays, but that instead the very phosphorescent materials, activated by sunlight, were the point of origin. What he found was different and totally unexpected. He placed phosphorescent uranium salts on a photographic plate, laid the plate on a windowsill so that sunlight could do its work, and developed the plate, on which he could see a dim silhouette of the salts.

Algis valiunas biography templates: Algis Valiunas articles: Nature

The sunlight, he reckoned, must be the trigger. To confirm his findings, he next placed a copper cross on the plate with the uranium salts; but there was no sunlight on that rainy February day, so Becquerel swathed his materials in a black cloth and secreted the lot in a drawer to wait for favorable conditions. The rain, however, kept up for days.

When he took out the bundle and developed the plate five days later, to his amazement the image of the cross showed clear as could be. Becquerel could not understand what he had found, for science had believed it impossible: spontaneous radiation, coming not from the sun but from an earthly element itself. He figured that some external energy source must have provoked the emission.

The so-called Becquerel rays, with their promise of vast, uncharted scientific territory, enticed the Curies. Not much had been written on the subject, so Marie largely needed to make her own way. When a uranium compound is placed on a metal plate A situated opposite another plate B and a difference in [electric] potential is maintained between the plates A and B, an electric current is set up between plates; this current can be measured with accuracy … and will serve as a measure of the activity of the substance.

She was describing an elementary Geiger counter. Devising the apparatus took the ingenuity of an experimental wizard, and handling it required the finesse of a master surgeon. M arie soon discovered that the intensity of radiation emitted by uranium rays did not depend on its physical or chemical state, but on the amount of uranium, and that therefore the emission was an atomic property of the element.

The want of thoroughness can be a gross scientific flaw, but it was not hers: she proceeded to extend her researches beyond uranium, where most physicists were inclined to stop, and she tested every available element or mineral for what she came to call radioactivity. A few elements were somewhat radioactive; thorium proved more so than uranium.

What really set off her measuring apparatus, though, was pitchblende, a black ore mined on the German-Bohemian border; uranium had already been extracted from the mineral, for use in fine ceramic glazes, so the super-potent radioactivity Marie detected was a mystery, and a trial. Measurements had to be repeated many times to make sure no crucial error had been made.

The more Marie measured, the more excited she grew: there had to be a new element here.

Algis valiunas biography templates: I took the name of the

No other scientists ever took more elaborate pains than they did in seeing their work to completion. Their initial work indeed produced substances many hundreds of times more radioactive than uranium, suggesting the presence of some new, unknown element. Eventually, after months of painstaking work, the Curies were able to purify the substance enough that spectroscopic analysis showed an absorption of wavelengths of light that could not be caused by any previously known algis valiunas biographies templates.

This method gave additional evidence for the existence of a new element, which Marie called polonium, after her native country. Within months, the Curies had also discovered radium, which, millions of times more radioactive than uranium, would become her signature achievement. But as Goldsmith writes, the process by which these discoveries were made was as revelatory and far-reaching as the discoveries themselves:.

Her greatest achievement was in employing an entirely new method to discover elements by measuring their radioactivity. In the next decade scientists who located the source and composition of radioactivity made more discoveries concerning the atom and its structure than in all the centuries that had gone before. At this point, however, her discovery remained incomplete, unfounded, theoretical.

If the Spiritualist professions were true, Pierre wrote, they would be among the most important scientific discoveries ever. Harder heads resisted the claims both of Spiritualism and of the latest physics. Identifying the elements by their radiation was not the same as isolating and weighing them. So the ordeal — for an ordeal it was — got underway.

After a few months of further work it became apparent that radium would be separated, seen, and weighed more easily than polonium; it also became clear that an immensity of pitchblende was necessary to yield any appreciable amount of radium. The Curies needed more work space, and they needed an open-handed donor to provide them with tons of pitchblende.

The Sorbonne, customarily forthcoming with facilities for importunate scientists, turned down their request. The School of Physics and Chemistry could offer the Curies only a former cadaver lab that had fallen into desuetude, broiling in summer, freezing in winter, leaking when it rained or snowed. They took it. They broke down the pitchblende into its constituent elements, through a series of operations staggering in their physical difficulty and stultifying in their tedium.

The toil exacted a severe price. Pierre was suffering bone pain, and Marie showed symptoms of tuberculosis; but neither would rest. Both husband and wife found the glowing blue treasure enchantingly beautiful. Life sped up vertiginously. Later that year Marie and Pierre, along with Henri Becquerel, were awarded the Nobel Prize in physics for their pathbreaking work on radioactivity.

Certain influential scientists did not want to grant Marie a share of the honor. Four French grandees, including three who were very familiar with her work, submitted an official nomination touting Pierre and Becquerel as sole discoverers, for the honor of the fatherland. It was sexism and xenophobia of a scurviness one might expect only from distinguished colleagues and supposed friends.

Fortunately, a brilliant and sympathetic Swedish mathematician on the Nobel committee informed Pierre before the fact that his wife was to be left out, and Pierre replied that in that case he would not accept the prize for himself. After much bureaucratic commotion, Marie was added to the list of honorees: insult first, distinction to follow.

Nobel Prizes set things into motion. That the Curies had toiled in such dinginess and obscurity embarrassed even the French. The government endowed a new chair for Pierre at the Sorbonne; only tough negotiation, however, got him a promise of his own laboratory and a position for Marie as head of research. Meanwhile, radium became all the rage.