[laughs]

But it's, it's not true, and furthermore, when you ask people, "Well, how do you know that? Where do you get that knowledge from?" It all goes back to just one source, and that's Jim's Watson's immensely readable but entirely unreliable book, The Double Helix, which was published in 1968, which is his version of events, in which he does say that he saw, let's just assume it was one of Franklin's photographs.

He doesn't actually say that, but let's just assume it was, and that this excited him, and he thought it would be possible to work out the structure.

Fair enough.

Let's...

Watson's excited.

Crick never sees this photograph.

How did all that happen?

[laughs]

...

but it's, it's not true.

And furthermore, when you ask people, "Well, how do you know that? Where do you get that knowledge from?" It all goes back to just one source, and that's Jim's Watson's immensely readable but entirely unreliable book, The Double Helix, which was published in 1968, which is his version of events, in which he does say that he saw, let's just assume it was one of Franklin's photographs.

He doesn't actually say that, but let's just assume it was, and that this excited him, and he thought it would be possible to work out the structure.

Fair enough.

Let's...

How did all that happen?

Yeah

...

so leave it to them.

But Crick changed that.

Crick's interest, his prestige, his ability to get articles published in Nature by literally picking up the phone and saying, "I want to send you an article," and they go, "Okay, great." So that meant he had a tremendous global influence on drawing the attention of scientists to this problem, and above all of showing them that you could approach this with a scientific mindset, and there were ways of thinking about taking steps towards understanding the materialist basis of consciousness, even if he didn't think it was immediately solvable.

You know, when I describe his life to a scientist, their eyes just bug out.

You know, he only made one grant application in his whole life.

Collaboration, collaboration, collaboration.

i mean

it benefited it benefited many people it fed many people just think of all the the bread you know the great the wheat flour that that it carried right not to mention other you know basic staples that we need in our life to nutrition wise uh And so when I look at that bridge and I ponder that bridge, and I know that the cost was that we lost Spirit Island and we displaced the whole two nations for that progress.

And so I always wonder from a developmental, a sustainable developmental point of view, well, you know, this is progress, but for who? Who is receiving the benefit of this progress? And so when I look at, um, bridges, um, I often think, well, is it, yeah, it's spanning this, uh, gap here.

And obviously, um, it looks like, you know, this was an engineering feat that is a eighth wonder of the world.

How did they do that? You know, it's what a progress, what a progress we've made as a, as a country, as a nation, as a human species because of these bridges.

And there's a part of me that wants to say, yeah, but what if there was a natural bridge already there? We call them portages up here in Minnesota.

What if there was already a natural bridge? What if there was a way to do that without building this bridge and drowning the Spirit Island and taking care of uh, what is already, uh, sacred here.

Yeah, Joanne, I mean, you know, that,

[laughs]

... certainly not every word thereof.

But what happens is in the summer of, late summer of 1951, Watson turns up in Cambridge to learn X-ray crystallography, and he's introduced to Crick, and they virtually straight away hit it off.

Watson was, what, 22, 23 when he arrives in Cambridge, so there's a substantial age difference and a big experiential difference, life difference between the two of them.

Watson's very ambitious.

Crick is much more of a magpie.

I mean, he's ambitious, but not in the same way as Watson was.

[laughs] Of course, yeah.

Really?

Uh, a dog, which is famously pretty good at smelling, uh, or we think it is compared to us, uh, would have around about 600.

So the, there are differences in the number of receptors, which kind of vaguely correlates to the range of odors you can detect.

But clearly, one of the things a dog can do, for example, is detect odors at much lower concentrations.

So dogs can, you know, sniff things that, that we can't.

Um, but that depends.

That depends on your physiological state.

[laughs] Can you talk to us about how you got into this work? Was there something about smell that sort of got you, where you thought, "This is the thing I wanna do"? Where did these questions come from for you?

Can you tell us more about that and the culture that led to that and how that's changed modern life?

I mean, it partly began much earlier than that.

So, uh, historians have studied the, the role of smell in, [laughs] in the French Revolution.

And perfumes started to become much more a symbol obviously of wealth, and it's still the case today.

You know, perfume adverts are just full of glamour and expense.

It gives you access to a, a different lifestyle.

That's the promise of the perfume advert.

Can smell or body odor tell us about our health?

Yes.

Um, so he, he got a pig.

He wanted to prove his point, and so he did a, an experiment, which was really a kind of demonstration.

Uh, it was a, a way of an argument with his opponents.

So they got a pig, and of course, there are no anesthetics at this time, so it's pretty gruesome.

Uh, they chain the pig down.

Uh, they bind its snout, so it can't bite you, and then they open it up, and the pig is very unhappy, as you can imagine.

Mm-hmm

So set the stage for us on, you know, when when crit comes online and starts working on these problems, what was the problem to solve in biology and genetics and all that?

Well, I mean, the underlying problem was what genes are made of and how they do what they do.

In other words, what's the molecular, cellular consequence of the existence of genes? And it had been known from the early 1940s that one of the main things that genes seemed to do was to produce proteins.

Each gene, it was initially thought, would produce one protein, probably an enzyme, which could then change a chemical reaction inside the cell, make something happen.

So a gene was a way of making things happen.

But the structure of the gene... was completely unknown.

So most people, like Schrödinger, thought that genes were probably made of proteins.

What's the problem to be solved here that he was working on?

Give us a sense of that.

Well, it all began, I guess it began in America, really, with electricity.

with the ability of Franklin to actually bring electricity down, very dangerous experiments, as everybody knows, with kites and keys and that kind of thing.

But in the 18th century, people began to be able to store electricity.

They could produce it in the form of static electricity.

So they'd get some amber or any kind of resin.

And, you know, just like, you know, maybe you do this for your kids or, you know, when you were a kid, your dad would do this.

so