Beschreibung
7 pp. Original wrappers. Very Good. First Edition. SIGNED BY MAURICE WILKINS AND BY RAYMOND GOSLING, on the front wrapper. At a meeting of the Faraday Society in May 1950, Rudolf Signer "gave out samples of his best [DNA], and Wilkins took some home to King's. A few days later, he was preparing part of this DNA in highly viscous solution for the ultraviolet studies he was doing. Unexpectedly, he noticed that every time he touched the stuff with the tip of a glass rod and then drew the rod away, 'I had spun a very thin fibre of DNA, almost invisible, like a filament of spider web.' The fibres seemed so perfect and uniform that the molecules in them must have been neatly aligned alongside one another. Examined under a microscope, in polarized light, the fibres behaved as though they were made up of well-ordered crystals. So Wilkins took the fibres to a graduate student in the unit, Raymond Gosling, who was doing the crystallography with rams' sperm and had borrowed the use of an antiquated x-ray apparatus in a lead-lined basement of the chemistry department. Several dozen of Wilkins's fibres had to be bundled together, in a tiny tungsten-wire frame where they could be tightened like a violin bow, to constitute a large enough specimen for the soft focus of the x-ray tube. Wilkins and Gosling remembered that Bernal, fifteen years before, had got the first good x-ray patterns from protein crystals by keeping them wet. Accordingly, they maintained the DNA fibres at high humidity. They got striking patterns, with many spots, sharp and detailed, far better than ever before seen from DNA, and for the first time unmistakably from a substance in crystalline form. . . . That series of diffraction pictures taken in May or June of 1950 provided the one Wilkins showed at the meeting in Naples, a year later, that galvanized Watson's enthusiasm for DNA and x-ray crystallography" (Judson, Eighth Day of Creation, expanded ed., pp. 78-79). Olby, The Path to the Double Helix, pp. 332-35 (including an illustration taken from Wilkins and Gosling's paper). Maurice Wilkins shared the Nobel Prize in 1962 in Physiology or Medicine with Francis H. C. Crick and James D. Watson "for their discoveries concerning the molecular structure of nucleic acids and its significance for information transfer in living material." NOTE: Another copy--also signed by Wilkins and Gosling--sold for $2400 (buyer's premium included) on April 6, 2017, at the Pacific Book Auctions sale 611 (lot 239). Bestandsnummer des Verkäufers 14339
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