July 30, 2007
-
Eight is a Gate, continued:
Behind Every
Great Man…
Odile
Crick with her husband, Francis H.C. Crick, in Cambridge, England. Mrs.
Crick, an artist, illustrated the work of her husband, whose team
received a Nobel Prize for its DNA research.Photo Credit: Courtesy Of The Salk Institute For Biological Studies “Her
graceful drawing of the double-helix structure of DNA with intertwined
helical loops has become a symbol of the achievements of science and
its aspirations to understand the secrets of life. The image
represents the base pairs of nucleic acids, twisted around a center
line to show the axis of the helix. Terrence J. Sejnowski, a
neuroscientist at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La
Jolla, where Francis Crick later worked, said: ‘Mrs. Crick’s drawing
was an abstract representation of DNA, but it was accurate with regard
to its shape and size of its spacing.‘The models you see now
have all the atoms in them,’ Sejnowski said. ‘The one in Nature was the
backbone and gave the bare outline. It may be the most famous
[scientific] drawing of the 20th century, in that it defines modern
biology.’”– Adam Bernstein in
The Washington Post, July 21, 2007
