Famous People in Biology for the CSET Part 3

Mar
25

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genetics, was born on April 6, 1928, in Chicago. A precocious student, he entered the University of Chicago at the age of 15 and graduated in 1947. Both Harvard and CalTech

turned him down for graduate studies, apparently unappreciative of his extensive background in the classics and his passion for bird watching. So Watson ended up at Indiana, where he gathered up his Ph.D. in genetics, setting out on the “search for the gene.”

In 1950, Watson joined the Cavendish laboratories at a time when Francis Crick, Maurice Wilkins, Rosalind Franklin, and Linus Pauling were racing to determine the structure of DNA. The X-ray crystallography experiments of Franklin and Wilkins provided much information about DNA - in particular that DNA was a molecule in which two “strands” formed a tightly linked pair. Crick and Watson made the intuitive leap: in 1953, they proposed that the structure of DNA was a winding helix in which pairs of bases (adenine paired with thymine and guanine paired with cytosine) held the two strands together. The Watson-Crick model of the DNA double helix provided enormous impetus for research in the emerging fields of molecular genetics and biochemistry, and Crick, Watson, and Wilkins were awarded the Nobel Prize in 1962.

In subsequent decades, Watson taught at Harvard and CalTech, and he became director of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York. He has made considerable contributions to the understanding of the genetic code, in which triplets of DNA base pairs identify amino acids and thereby control protein synthesis facilitated by DNA templates.

cset
Screen Shot of Exercise from the CSET Study Guide

A boy frog telephones the Psychic Hotline and his Personal Psychic Advisor tells him: “You are going to meet a beautiful young girl who will want to know everything about you.”

The frog is thrilled, “This is great! Will I meet her at a party?”

“No,” says his Advisor, “in her biology class.”

By Todd Brackett
http://www.ACEtheCSET.com
Todd Brackett

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