Rosalind Franklin

...

Broadway, and then I did a, a play about, um, a female scientist called Rosalind Franklin who, um-

[cheering] So, so you do love the, you-

Called Photograph 51.

Right.

So no Rosalind Franklin.

She's increasingly known.

No Ada Lovelace.

So Misha didn't know what its role was or what it looked like.

One of the scientists who helped figure that out was Rosalind Franklin, a young biophysicist in London nearly a hundred years later.

Using a technique called X-ray diffraction, Franklin may have been the first to confirm the helical structure of DNA.

She also figured out that the sugar phosphate backbone existed on the outside of the structure.

So why is Rosalind Franklin not exactly a household name? Well, two reasons.

One, unlike Watson and Crick, Franklin was happy to share data with her rivals.

It was

I

bet Rosalind Franklin thinks so.

I think so, too.

DNA

Now let me introduce you to someone very special.

Her name is Rosalind Franklin.

Now Rosalind Franklin was a real person, a brilliant British scientist from the 20th century who played a crucial groundbreaking role in helping discover the structure of DNA, the molecule that is basically the instruction manual for all life on Earth.

Basically DNA is too important, right? So she didn't always get that credit she deserved during her lifetime, which is a whole other story.

But the European Space Agency decided to honour her legacy in the most wonderful way by naming their Mars rover after her.

The Rosalind Franklin Rover, a rover explorer built in Europe, designed to travel across all surface of Mars and search for signs of life.

And this rover is a clever one, of course, you guys.

Most Mars rovers drive around on the surface and examine rocks and soil from the top.

There's a I think OpenAI, of course, did a science initiative, brought in leading physicists to solve various physics problems, dealing with fusion and what have you, material science and photovoltaics.

Then they moved to a model, a rumored model, called Rosalind, after Rosalind Franklin, DNA days.

Can you comment on specialized models for complex biological systems? I think Meta is giving it a shot as well.

I think it's somewhat the Holy Grail, right? That's why Demis Hassabis is so inclined to work on isomorphic because that's really the frontier.

And so what that is, is it's basically 3D photography of molecules.

And so one of the most famous examples of it being used is a rock star scientist, Rosalind Franklin, who used this technique to discover that DNA is a double helix.

And unfortunately, her data was shared without her permission with Watson and Crick, and they received the Nobel Prize for it, and she did not.

She passed away.

Essentially, these molecular mechanisms were badly programmed.

In the 1950s, James Watson, Francis Crick, Maurice Wilkins, and Rosalind Franklin discovered how living cells replicate using DNA, or deoxyribonucleic acid.

DNA is a double-stranded molecule that contains a list of orders for how it wants a living cell to be constructed.

And then a single strand, RNA, reads those program orders and sets in motion the production of the proteins necessary to accomplish them.