…it is just a very short walk along and across Downing Street, then the top of Pembroke Street and along the narrow confines of Free School Lane to get to the Eagle. Some of the best beer in Cambridge was a mere 6 minutes amble from my base on the Downing Street Site where Earth Sciences were (and still are) based in the university, so the path was very regularly trodden as you might expect. On the way, barely noticed after a tedious day in the lab or library one has to pass the New Museums Site with, prominently displayed on a wall, a plaque celebrating the original site of the Cavendish Laboratory where Messrs Watson and Crick did much of their work on DNA. And yes, they will also have called it a day, shut the lab doors and made their way to the pub too – in fact it was in the bar that folklore says that Francis Crick proclaimed that he and James Watson had ‘discovered the secret of life’, no doubt aided by a pint or two of Greene King. In fact once upon a time I took my turn to ‘entertain’ a slightly geeky audience of Geologists in the same bar, albeit my tale was one of Lower Palaeozoic rocks in Mid-Wales. The world was not set alight, and the editors of scientific journals across the globe remained splendidly unaware. The beer was good though!
That was 70 years ago now and the story is well documented in many books, including the vital roles in the research played by other scientists in Cambridge and beyond – Lawrence Bragg, the Nobel Prize winning crystallographer, June Broomhead and others working on the structure of organic molecules, and Bill Cochran who was studying the X ray images detailing single helical structures. Perhaps above all sits the brilliant work of Rosalind Franklin at KCL, whose X ray images of crystal structure put bones beneath the flesh of the theoretical structures that Watson and Crick had proposed – and was promptly forgotten. The story is one of innovation, insight and amazing science, but one that is shot through with tones of misogyny and unfairness too. It isn’t just the molecular structures that are complex, the personalities of the scientific cast and their interrelationships take some unravelling too.
After seven decades the aftershocks from the science continues however. Work on molecular biology expanded; the Cavendish grew beyond the old site in the centre of Cambridge and migrated in the early ‘70s to the current site in West Cambridge. There is now an enormous Biomedical Campus including an MRC Research Centre, genome research is part of the mainstream and gene editing based on CRISR (Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeat) sequences has massive future potential in many different fields. The science is extraordinary, the possibilities are endless and a whole new industry has grown into its current bewildering complexity and multi-billion dollar scale. I thought I would stir up the Heads of the three Science Departments at school on Friday by asking them into which scientific departmental bucket Watson & Crick would fall. To their credit they ignored the provocation and made the point that the work – like most great science – resists categorization. The boundaries between the sciences dissolve as research refuses to be type cast, and it is this which has characterized the DNA related developments that have taken place all the way from 1953 to the present day.
SDS
