Watson & Crick team up

42:11but at separate >> at separate times. >> At separate times. This is the same prize going to father and son. >> NBA players who have sons that play. No one cares about that. >> Yeah. Yeah. On the same team at the same time. >> Yeah. So, this is this is William and Lawrence Bragg, right? They they won for developing X-ray crystalallography. Basically the idea of X-ray crystalallography is you've got some crystal let's say which is a bunch of electron density maps right you've got electron densities here and here and here where the atoms are and X-ray comes in remember the X-ray has a wavelength that is about the size of the atomic spacing about one angstrom so what you can do is when the X-ray interacts with

42:53that crystal it's going to constructively interfere and destructively interfere meaning it's going to add up >> and it's going to cancel out. So, at certain angles, it's going to add up and you're going to get a bright spot. At other angles, it's going to cancel out and you're going to get nothing. Right? >> By looking at the angles of where stuff adds up and where stuff cancels out, you can, you know, by looking at the angle, what I mean is you can rotate this crystal and keep shooting X-rays. >> Right. Right. So, I'm shooting a beam, some some a beam of Xrays of X-rays at a crystal. >> Mhm. And then it's going to go through that crystal. And on the other side, I have a photographic plate. I have

43:34something that I'm going to track and I can move the crystal around and I'm going to get different a different map >> based on how and that map allows me to actually then reconstruct >> what the crystal is. >> What the crystal is even though the map is like a 2D Yeah. >> structure, but because I rotate and then I can reverse engineer. >> Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. you're you're in technical terms you're getting a kind of forier transform okay >> in frequency space of like what frequencies at what angles are doing what and then from that I can then back calculate right and um the funny thing about this right you think Lawrence Bragg and William Bragg father-son duo

44:15sounds like Nepo baby >> sounds like a nepo baby right >> Lawrence Bragg who's the son is actually the guy who came up with this technique No way. >> His dad, William Bragg, was in charge of the lab at the time and he set up the experimental apparatus. But Lawrence Bragg is the guy who came up with the mathematics and the equations for it. >> That's incredible. And when his dad William Bragg reported their results at the meetings and in a paper, he gives he gives credit to his unnamed son saying that my this person my son came up with the equation, but the son is not a co-author on the paper

44:57and this is something that like Lawrence Bragg had to deal with for the rest of his life. It was kind of like a trauma that he got from his dad. >> No way, bro. You're telling me, >> dude. He wasn't. Yeah, dude. This is He's not a Nepo baby. The dad is a Nepo dad. >> You know who this This is There's a viral story right now about Simon Cowell, >> the like judge from American Idol. >> He's come out in public in the last like two weeks and said, "My son is going to get none of my whatever $500 million empire. Zero. All my money is going to go to charity and he's gonna have to figure it out." Yeah. And it's not quite the perfect analogy, but it's like the dad basically took the son's work and

45:39was like, "Oh, I guess I'm the only named person." >> Yeah. Oh, that's nice. >> That's convenient. Yeah. This I mean I I wouldn't say because with the Simon with the Simon thing, at least Simon's the guy who like did the >> the thing the thing. >> He did the thing. >> This is Lawrence Bragg actually came up with X-ray crystalography. >> This kid's work he put in the paper and said, "Ah, my name's on it." >> Yeah. Yeah. He wasn't even a co-author. They both got the Nobel Prize, but to be honest, only the son should have gotten the Nobel Prize. [laughter] The dad just had his name on the building. >> Yeah, he just had the facilities. >> Yeah. So, he was a Nepo dad. I don't think you have the facilities for that, >> bro. But at this point, like Lawrence Bragg is clearly extremely talented and

46:21at this point, he is the director of the Caendish Lab for good reason. 25, he wins a Nobel Prize. He's astute and he wants he he he's been he's been using the Cavendish lab to create X-ray crystalallography of a bunch of crystals. They're just getting into biological compounds, creating protein crystals and finding the structure of those. He really wants this. He really wants the DNA >> Yeah. >> structure >> to be to be in England. Okay. >> In Caendish. >> Okay. >> Okay. >> Okay. I see what you're doing. >> Right. I see what you're doing. Now, [laughter] now so he hires uh Francis Crick. Francis Crick is a physicist and at the time Francis Crick um he starts

47:04studying with a bunch of other colleagues at the time. He starts studying just X-ray crystalallography in general. And he's asking what would X-ray crystalallography look like for different types of molecules. >> Specifically, he's trying to ask what would a helical molecule >> look like in X-ray photograph. >> Helical meaning helix.