The rockefeller university

Event Details

Type

Other Lectures and Symposia

Speaker(s)

Angela Creager, Ph.D., Thomas M. Siebel Professor in the History of Science, Princeton University, After the Double Helix: Rosalind Franklin the Virologist

Speaker bio(s)

Dr. Angela Creager studies the history of 20th-century biomedical research. Professor Creager completed a Ph.D. in biochemistry at the University of California, Berkeley, where she developed an interest in the history of biology. Supported by postdoctoral awards, she retrained as a historian of science at Harvard University and MIT, and joined the Princeton History Department where she currently serves as chair. Her talk will focus on Rosalind Franklin, who following her famous DNA work with James Watson and Francis Crick, moved to J. D. Bernal’s crystallography laboratory at Birkbeck College, where she shifted her focus to the three-dimensional structure of viruses, obtaining diffraction patterns of Tobacco mosaic virus (TMV) of unprecedented detail and clarity. Franklin's research on TMV illustrates the connections between structural studies of nucleic acids and structural studies of proteins and viruses, and reveals how the protagonists of the “race for the double helix” continued to interact scientifically and personally during the years that Watson and Crick’s model for the double-helical structure of DNA was debated and confirmed.

Open to

Campus Only