Simple Past.1

ENGLISH 2018- CAREER: BIOCHEMISTRY
InglésBásico Prof: Farm. NuriM.Cabral APRIL 25, 2019
PASADO SIMPLE . SIMPLE PAST

1. Read and Translate to the spanish the Text about:
James Watson, Francis Crick, Maurice Wilkins, and Rosalind
Franklin.
Rosalind Franklin
Of the four DNA researchers, only Rosalind Franklin had any degrees in chemistry.
She was born into a prominent London banking family, where all the children—girls
and boys—were encouraged to develop their individual aptitudes. She attended
Newnham College, one of the women’s colleges at Cambridge University. She
completed her degree in 1941 in the middle of World War II and undertook
graduate work at Cambridge with Ronald Norrish, a future Nobel laureate. She
resigned her research scholarship in just one year to contribute to the war effort at
the British Coal Utilization Research Association. There she performed fundamental
investigations on the properties of coal and graphite. She returned briefly to
Cambridge, where she presented a dissertation based on this work and was
granted a PhD in physical chemistry. After the war, through a French friend, she
gained an appointment at the Laboratoire Centrale des Services Chimiques de
l’Etat in Paris, where she was introduced to the technique of X-ray crystallography
(see video on this page) and rapidly became a respected authority in this field. In
1951 she returned to England to King’s College London, where her charge was to
upgrade the X-ray crystallographic laboratory there for work with DNA.
Maurice Wilkins
Already at work at King’s College was Maurice Wilkins, a New Zealand–born but
Cambridge-educated physicist. As a new PhD he worked during World War II on
the improvement of cathode-ray tube screens for use in radar and then was
shipped out to the United States to work on the Manhattan Project. Like many other
nuclear physicists, he became disillusioned with his subject when it was applied to
the creation of the atomic bomb; he turned instead to biophysics, working with his
Cambridge mentor, John T. Randall—who had undergone a similar conversion—
first at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland and then at King’s College London.
It was Wilkins’s idea to study DNA by X-ray crystallographic techniques, which he
had already begun to implement when Franklin was appointed by Randall. The
relationship between Wilkins and Franklin was unfortunately a poor one and
probably slowed their progress.
James Watson and Francis Crick
Meanwhile, in 1951, 23-year-old James Watson, a Chicago-born American, arrived

at the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge. Watson had two degrees in zoology: a
bachelor’s degree from the University of Chicago and a doctorate from Indiana
University, where he became interested in genetics. He had worked under Salvador
E. Luria at Indiana on bacteriophages, the viruses that invade bacteria in order to
reproduce—a topic for which Luria received a Nobel Prize in Physiology or
Medicine in 1969. Watson went to Denmark for postdoctoral work, to continue
studying viruses and to remedy his relative ignorance of chemistry. At a conference
in the spring of 1951 at the Zoological Station at Naples, Watson heard Wilkins talk
on the molecular structure of DNA and saw his recent X-ray crystallographic
photographs of DNA. He was hooked.
Watson soon moved to the Cavendish Laboratory, where several

important X-ray crystallographic projects were in progress. Under
the leadership of William Lawrence Bragg, Max Perutz was
investigating hemoglobin and John Kendrew was studying
myoglobin, a protein in muscle tissue that stores oxygen. (Perutz
and Kendrew received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for their work in
the same year that the prize was awarded to the DNA researchers—
1962.) Working under Perutz was Francis Crick, who had earned a
bachelor’s degree in physics from University College London and
had helped develop radar and magnetic mines during World War II.
Crick, another physicist in biology, was supposed to be writing a
dissertation on the X-ray crystallography of hemoglobin when
Watson arrived, eager to recruit a colleague for work on DNA.
Inspired by Pauling’s success in working with molecular models,
Watson and Crick rapidly put together several models of DNA and
attempted to incorporate all the evidence they could gather.
Franklin’s excellent X-ray photographs, to which they had gained
access without her permission, were critical to the correct solution.
The four scientists announced the structure of DNA in articles that
appeared together in the same issue of Nature.
These four scientists—Watson, Crick, Franklin, and Wilkins—
codiscovered the double-helix structure of DNA, which formed the basis
for modern biotechnology.
From: sciencehistory.org
To be continued…….

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ENGLISH 2018- CAREER: BIOCHEMISTRY

InglésBásico Prof: Farm. NuriM.Cabral APRIL 25, 2019

PASADO SIMPLE . SIMPLE PAST

James Watson and Francis Crick

Meanwhile, in 1951, 23-year-old James Watson, a Chicago-born American, arrived

Watson soon moved to the Cavendish Laboratory, where several

These four scientists—Watson, Crick, Franklin, and Wilkins—

codiscovered the double-helix structure of DNA, which formed the basis

for modern biotechnology.

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