More people are simply more aware of Watson and not Bernal, Klug, Wilkins, Fankuchen, Hodgkin, i.e. other people from that era involved in x-ray crystallography, many of whom made significantly more and larger advances, precisely because he was a self-aggrandizing and controversial asshole while they were not.
Are you sure they were not assholes? How much do you really know about their personal lives?
I'm not trying to criticize those people or imply anything about them. But in my experience a lot of assholes kind of fly under the radar because they're not in the public eye and no one speaks up.
Then call out the ones you know for a fact are assholes and racists, and stop adding to the problem by whitewashing and excusing and carrying their water.
I personally know LOTS of brilliant people in the bay area tech scene who are not assholes, and are wonderful kind people, so if you only know assholes, you're hanging out with and licking the boots of the wrong people, and that's your problem, and you should re-think who your friends and heros are.
Hold on there buddy, you totally missed the point. I also know lots of brilliant people in the Bay Area tech scene who are not assholes. This thread isn't about brilliant people, it's about those who are commonly considered "great". Like, let's say, Steve Jobs.
And I flagged your comment for accusing me of licking boots. You don't even know me. Do better.
To defend Wilkins, it was John Randall, the director of the lab Wilkins and Franklin both worked in, who probably intentionally pitted them against each other to mess with or motivate Wilkins. Wilkins was possibly the most honorable out of all five people involved in the situation.
Wilkins was "second-in-command" to Randall, developed the DNA structure project, and convinced Randall to assign more people to work on it. Randall then hired Franklin, reassigned Gosling, the graduate student who had been working with Wilkins, to Franklin, and told Franklin that Wilkins would simply be handing over his data to her and that she would subsequently have full ownership of the project. Randall didn't tell Wilkins any of this of course, so a lot of hard feelings developed between Franklin and him. The situation got worse when Wilkins tried to get sample from external collaborators to continue working on the project himself and Randall forced him to hand over one of the samples to Franklin. Franklin finally got sick of Randall herself and left, leaving Randall to turn over all the data to Wilkins, who then went to talk about his pet research interest with Crick, a personal friend of his. Wilkins then recused himself from Crick's paper, feeling he hadn't contributed enough to it. He also worried publicly to others that maybe he had been unkind and driven Franklin out, having minimal insight into Randall's tactics, which are unfortunately common in the field. When they're being used on you by someone skilled in them, it's often hard to realize, and you end up being resentful of the person you're being pitted against until one of you leaves and you suddenly have clarity because the stress of the situation is suddenly reduced.
I am adjacent to the field, have read old perspectives, and have worked closely with some of that milieu's students, so that I have gotten my share of gossip from octogenerians who still pick sides in all of this. To spread some of that gossip, one opinion worth mentioning is that the only "real genius" among that group (including Franklin and Wilkins) was actually Crick, and that Watson was precocious but that his real brilliance was clinging to him. It's probably worth mentioning that being a 30 something doing a PhD seems to be a big advantage, though, especially if it's after a decade of doing physics research.
Edit: Watson is also personally responsible for convincing one of the most unethical and conniving scientists I know to go into science rather than medicine, so I have additional reasons to be suspicious, given assholes propagate assholes. If you're a Crick, for God's sake, stop taking pity, and don't tolerate Watsons even if you feel bad for them or they treat you in particular very well, have some standards and be a Stoner.
> Watson is also personally responsible for convincing one of the most unethical and conniving scientists I know to go into science rather than medicine
I'm just another grad student doing something between comp bio and structure so take this all with a grain of salt, but I'd read about cryo-ET, FIB milling, structural proteomics, and spatial proteomics (Matthias Mann's group's work comes to mind as an example of some of the wildest stuff people can do). Plenty of groups are working on what you describe but the details are tough. To give a non-technical description of the problem, most structure techniques rely on either explicit or implicit averaging to get good resolution. Small crystals or particle numbers, conformational heterogeneity, and beam-induced radiation damage are big resolution killers. People have figured out all kinds of tricks that amount to purifying a ton of protein, making sure it crystallizes well/is relatively homogenous with a good distribution of ways it sticks to a grid, and minimizing sample beam exposure during diffraction/SPA, which require relatively little, anyway. With cryo-ET, though, you aren't taking a ton of micrographs of a ton of particles or quickly zapping (well, you're rotating it and exposing it for some time under a little jet of super cold air, but hey, it works) a crystal that diffracted precisely because you got a large, relatively structurally homogenous lattice, you're taking a series of micrographs of the same cell, which is structurally probably way more different from other cells than one protein conformation is from another (and that’s if you culture/sort your cells ahead of time instead of working with tissue). Meanwhile, you're frying your sample from the prolonged exposure time a tilt series requires and not even getting a full tilt series because you can't rotate the darn sample holder 360 degrees (though people train CNNs to get around the missing wedge problem now). Once you've reconstructed a structure from your tomographs, how are you going to assign the blobs and squiggles you think you see in your gray static? You either need to know what you're looking ahead of time which requires pre-existing structures and good guesses on location (presumably reasonable to do with something like actin or microtubules, pretty tough with John Doe globular, cytosolic protein that looks like everything else at bad resolution), some kind of labeling (so now you probably need a cryo-CLEM or whatever too or to add something pretty big/distinct which comes with other problems), or you add mass-spec somehow. Oh, and I took the FIB milling for granted when describing this, btw (if you want to look at an entire cell, trying to FIB mill the entire thing is like trying to replace all your walls with glass, so we're back to sampling the right parts/averaging). If you add mass-spec, you’re basically trying to make the smallest laser micro dissection slices ever on a sample that you might have to almost destroy if you want to see more than figments of your imagination. So, hundreds of stupid little problems but people are working on it, and there's work for people with strong computer vision/ML backgrounds.
RNA is a totally different problem since it's often described as pretty "floppy" compared to protein and we don't have that many RNA structures, so presumably it's harder to assign things unless you're looking at well-studied complexes. Aren’t transcriptomics people working on this, though? Maybe MERFISH does kind of what you want just without pipelines for depth assignment yet (or maybe these exist).
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