On this day in 1920, the great British physical chemist Rosalind Franklin was born. If you haven’t heard of her, it is simply because she’s a woman. Really. The sexism against her was unbelievable. Although Francis Crick said that her X-ray diffraction work was critical to his Nobel Prize winning discovery of the structure of DNA, the Nobel committee didn’t even mention her. What’s more, Crick’s partner Watson made repeated attacks on her as a scientist and generally minimized her contributions to the science—after she had died, of course.
Born to an extremely influential Jewish family in Britain, she showed academic greatness at an early age. Then she went to Cambridge where she received Second Class Honors. She did not receive a Bachelor’s degree, because at that time, Cambridge didn’t give them to women. It did allow her to go on and do more advanced work. She eventually got her PhD for work on the physical chemistry (especially porosity) of coal. This was during World War II, and the work had special military applications like coal’s use in gas masks. What’s perhaps most interesting about this, is that it had nothing much to do with her later work.
After the war, she got a job working with X-ray crystallographer Jacques Mering in France. She applied the new techniques to coal and published a number of significant papers. But the main thing was that she became an expert in the use of X-ray diffraction on complex organic compounds. So in 1951, she was brought to King’s College London where she started her work on the structure of DNA. Also working there was Maurice Wilkins, who would go on to share the Nobel Prize with Watson and Crick. Wilkins and Franklin did not get along, partly because of the usual academic politics, but also because they were such different people.
I wish that I could explain to you the work these people were doing. Sadly, I can’t. To begin with, organic chemistry is still very much a mystery to me. And embarrassingly, even though I’ve done some work with X-ray crystallography, I never really understood it. Basically, you bombard an object with X-rays and look at how the object changes the X-rays’ directions. This allows you to infer the structure of the object. But really, stuff like this has always felt very much like black magic to me. So I have a great respect (and awe) for those who pioneered the work.
But about that sexism. The truth is that by all accounts, Franklin was a difficult person. But this is hardly unusual. I’ve met more than my fair share of great scientists and as a group they are arrogant and impatient—generally not the kind of people you want at cocktail parties. But had Franklin been a man, everyone would have just accepted this. But she was a woman and as a result, she wasn’t seen as just another difficult genius, but someone with “problems.” And in addition to everything else, Watson minimized her work. Still, had she lived, even Watson admitted that she should have shared the Nobel Prize with the three men.
Unfortunately, at the age of 35, she was diagnosed with Ovarian cancer. She got treatment for it and continued to work right up to two weeks before her death at the age of 37. At that point, she was working on the polio virus. She did an amazing amount of outstanding work in her short lifetime.
Happy birthday Rosalind Franklin!
A fairly common thing for college students to do is to write parody lyrics to the fight song of a rival. Just such a thing was done by some creative student or students at Stanford University with the Berkeley fight song. It goes:
I have some medical news and it’s less than a year old! The Cleveland Clinic reported, 
I was thinking about a little bit of conservative polemics that I noticed during the 2012 election, although surely it is older than that. It goes something like this: Americans don’t see themselves as rich and poor; they see themselves as rich and soon-to-be rich. Now this is nonsense as politics go. Of course it isn’t true. Most poor people are just trying to get by; they don’t even have fantasies about being rich, unless it involves the state lottery. But even as an aspirational claim (We want poor Americans to think of themselves as the soon-to-be rich!) it doesn’t work. Most people don’t want to be rich. Most people want to become something and while that usually does involve making more money, it rarely involves being rich.
I gotta get this off my desk. For a month, I’ve wanted to talk about this amazing video, 
Second, this is a weird form of solipsism. The normal kind is where we can’t know if anything outside of yourself exists. But this form is that we can’t know what’s going on in a bird’s brain. Well, that’s true. But I also can’t know what is going on in other humans’ brains. Maybe they actually think like I do, or maybe it’s just stimulus-response. Maybe other humans seem to think like I do, but they are really more like alligators without as many teeth. Who can say?
On this day in 1858, the great American ethnographer 
On this day in 1851, the great archaeologist 
Here in Northern California, it has been very hot the last couple of weeks. And with the heat has come the houseflies. Normally, I don’t notice them and I don’t really care. As long as there is not one buzzing past me and distracting me, what’s the big deal? But yesterday, I came into the kitchen and behind the blinds on the front window were a group of at least a dozen flies. I grabbed the fly swatter and went on a killing spree. It was terrible. It was like if the United States went to war with with Ghana.
It’s quite a day for birthdays, as you can see from last year’s post, 
Here’s a question for you, what has saved more lives: condoms or new AIDS drugs? That’s a rhetorical question unless you are a complete idiot. As the saying goes: an ounce of prevention is worth of pound of cure. But I think the weights are off. It ought to be more like, “A gram of prevention is worth a metric ton of cure.” And so it is with global warming. This morning, Jonathan Chait wrote, 
Something I really hate is when a website allows you to write a comment with paragraph breaks, but when it’s published, everything gets pushed together in one long paragraph. Such is the case with Google when you do reviews of websites. You can do that when you search for a big website on Google. You can’t, for example, search for “Frankly Curious” and get the option to write a review. But the Cato Institute is very big and so when I did a search on them, there were reviews so I thought I would add my own thoughts. After all, I used to be a big fan of Cato. Since then, two things have happened: my thinking has evolved and their thinking has devolved.
I do want to give a special call out to the