Daily Archives: April 25, 2013

A new cache of letters released 50 years after Maurice Wilkins, Francis Crick and James Watson won the Nobel Prize for the discovery of DNA's structure reveals that not everyone agreed on which prize the trio should receive.

Wilkins, Crick and Watson ended up winning the 1962 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine "for their discoveries concerning the molecular structure of nucleic acids and its significance for information transfer in living material," according to the official citation. But at least one scientist nominated them for the chemistry prize instead, researchers write this week (April 25) in the journal Nature.

Nature first published a series of three papers describing the structure of DNA by the team on April 25, 1953, making this year the 60th anniversary of the discovery. Watson, Crick, Wilkins and Rosalind Franklin (who died before the 1962 Nobel Prize was awarded) and their colleagues were the first to understand DNA's unique double-helix structure. [Photos: Crick DNA Nobel On the Auction Block]

Nobel Prize puzzler

Jan Witkowski and Alexander Gann of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York wrote to the Nobel committee to request the release of the nomination letters for the 1962 prize, as nomination letters are unsealed after 50 years. To their surprise, one letter seemed to be missing: That of Jacque Monod, a French biologist who would later win the Nobel Prize himself for research into the genetics of enzymes.

"We were surprised because both Jim Watson and Francis Crick said that Monod was one of the people who nominated them," Witkowski told LiveScience. In fact, in 1961, Crick sent Monod a nine-page letter telling the story of the DNA structure discovery, at Monod's request.

Monod worked at the Pasteur Institute in Paris, so Witkowski and Gann turned to the Institute's archives to solve the puzzle of the missing nomination. There, they found Monod's nomination letter only sent to an unexpected address.

"It turns out that he nominated them for the chemistry prize, and not the medicine prize," Witkowski said. That's why the medicine or physiology committee had no record of the nomination, though the committees must have shared the nomination letters to decide which of the two prizes the DNA structure scientists should win.

Third nominee

The nomination letters also reveal that Franklin, who died in 1958, was never nominated for the Nobel Prize. There has been a lot of controversy over whether Franklin would have shared in the Nobel had she been alive in 1962, Witkowski said. (Nobels are not awarded posthumously.) Many have argued that Franklin's contributions were downplayed and overlooked by Watson and Crick.

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Newfound Nobel Letters Reveal Secrets of DNA Prize

The discovery of the DNA double helix 60 years ago proved to be a headache for the Nobel organisation as the feat became nominated for prizes in different categories at the same time, Nature reported on Wednesday.

Francis Crick and Maurice Wilkins of Britain and James Watson of the United States shared the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1962, nine years after revealing that the code for life has a spiral-staircase structure joined by chemical rungs.

But two researchers who delved into the award process were stunned to find that the trio were simultaneously nominated for the Nobel Prize for Chemistry that same year.

"The fact that the double helix was the subject of nominations for both prizes must have presented a dilemma for the two [award] committees," Alexander Gann and Jan Witkowski of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York report in a letter to the journal.

The evidence comes from a letter that French geneticist Jacques Monod wrote to the Nobel Committee for Chemistry, nominating the trio for the chemistry award. Gann and Witkowski found the letter in the archives of the Pasteur Institute in Paris.

In the event, the 1962 chemistry Nobel went to Max Perutz and John Kendrew for work on haemoglobin and myoglobin.

The only person to have won the Nobel in different categories of science is Marie Curie, who in 1903 shared the physics award with her husband Pierre and Henri Becquerel, and in 1911 was the sole winner of the chemistry prize.

Separately, Gann and Witkowski say that Crick wrote a nine-page letter to Monod on December 31 1961 to describe his joint quest with Watson to identify DNA.

In his letter, Crick "acknowledges the importance" of X-ray imaging by Rosalind Franklin in determining "certain features" of DNA's structure, the pair say.

Franklin has become a cause celebre among some feminists, who say Crick, Watson and Wilkins snubbed her and never acknowledged her vital contribution.

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DNA breakthrough spelt double trouble for Nobels