Rosalind Franklin arrives

34:33>> Oh Yeah, incredible, incredible work. And one day, one day when this podcast is big, I want to go there and and record. >> We'll do a live show in the room. >> Show the room where it happens because they they still have the old Caendish Lab there. They they have a new building now in Cambridge that is off campus that has all of the big facilities obviously. And Cavendish Lab in Cambridge, don't get me wrong, okay? Cavendish Lab in Cambridge is still one of the foremost institutions for experimental physics research, right? But the old building which is in the center of town um in the in like the old Gothic architecture, I mean, you can't beat that. It's kind of like the uh Fris Campus Center at Princeton, right? First Camping Center

35:15there. It it says Palmer Physics Lab and you've got uh >> you've got >> these statues of Benjamin Franklin and Joseph Henry, which are some of the founders of American physics. You can't beat the building where Einstein had >> an office, [laughter] right? You know, now now we've got Jadwin Hall, which is, might I just say, the most depressing piece of architecture on Princeton campus, built in the 1960s. Brutalist architecture. I saw The Brutalist. It's a fine movie. The [laughter] architecture is absolute trash. Can I just say I it is it when you look at it cuz there's a lot of beautiful amazing things to look at on Princeton's campus. >> Yeah. No. And Juan Hall is not one of

35:56them. >> It's pretty depressing. >> No, it's it's awful. [laughter] Yeah. But it does its job. It does its job and it's still pumping out amazing research. >> Look, and and Nobel Prize winners. >> Yeah. Yeah. All the time. So So anyways, let's get back to Cavendish Lab and King's College. These are the two rooms where it happens. Okay. >> We're first actually going to run into Rosalyn Franklin. >> Okay. >> Rosalyn Franklin is this young u PhD right out of Paris. She joins John Randall's group at the MRC, which is the medical research council, the biohysics unit at King's College. Okay? And Randall writes to her and assigns her responsibility for the DNA project.

36:39>> But he does not clearly inform the guy who he already has on staff, Maurice Wilkins, that he's doing this. >> Oh. So Maurice Wilkins thinks that Rosalyn Franklin is joining as kind of a lab assistant. Here we go. But Randall has explicitly wrote in a letter to Rosalyn Franklin that no, you're going to have your own lab. She's been doing a lot of X-ray crystalallography, which we're going to get into um in Paris. She's been actually investigating the structure of coal using X-rays and trying to figure out the crystalline properties of coal. Um, there's a miscommunication there happening from the head of the lab, John

37:20Randall, and that seeds years of personal tension between Maurice Wilkins and Rosalyn Franklin. These are two players at King's College in London. >> Maurice is like, I'm here. Oh, you're bringing someone new. They're my executive assistant. They're going to help me take out the trash. >> Yeah. Give me >> Yeah. Yeah. If I'm going to be like, I need this particular scan done, they're going to do it. They're not really going to have the intellectual autonomy that is required for a true scientist. >> Right. Right. They're not going to be smart enough and they're not going to have agency was Maurice's viewpoint. >> Yeah. >> But Randall was like, "No, no, no, no, no." Like, you're going to you're you're at you're >> you're at equal level. >> Yeah. Right.

38:00>> But he didn't tell Maurice, [sighs] >> you know, and obviously that's going to cause issues. >> 100%. >> Right. Especially cuz like Rosalyn Franklin is a woman. So like >> it's like she's coming in at the time she's coming in. It's like oh this is my secretary, >> right? This this this this is actually in the same era maybe a little bit earlier as Mad Men the TV show. >> No, no, no. Exactly. >> Just in terms for context. >> Yeah. It's it's the same dynamic, right? There's a new person that comes in. She's really good at what she does, but no one's taking her seriously. least of all Maurice Wilkins because he didn't he didn't get the memo that this is someone that you need to take seriously as an equal. >> Right. >> Right. Right.

38:41>> Um >> Right. >> So at the time they they both get into King's College. Maurice Wilkins is already there. He's he's established there. Rosyn Franklin is a new researcher and they start researching DNA. They get these samples from Rudolph Signner um in Austria. And this guy, Rudolph Signner, is an incredible DNA experimentalist. And what he's really good at is getting pure samples of DNA. >> Okay. Okay. And we've got pure samples of DNA that are coming in from this guy all the way from Austria. >> Okay. Right.

39:23They're originally obtained by Wilkins, but now because Rosen and Franklin is kind of this equal player, she's getting samples too. >> And these are very precious >> because it's really hard to extract DNA. Signar's found some secret formula >> to do it. >> He found the Krabby Patty secret