Ingratitude is an absolute sin: how I forgot two brilliant ones scientists and they died in obscurity, while the investigations and their results would change our world!
The best definition of man is: “the ignorant biped,” someone wrote while studying him. Historymore and more you agree with his three words.
Ingratitude was the reward for many of those who have spent their lives studying, researching, always having before them the vision of changing the world. For example, the woman who played a key role in discovering its structure DNA· when she achieved her goal, her research data was stolen, she was forgotten and died young, beautiful and invisible… Or remember the case of the doctor who revolutionized her science by discovering the relationship between dirt and contagion. diseases: his job hated him, and he died in custody in psychiatric hospital.
Didn’t you wash your hands? Where are you going;
In the mid-19th century, countless women who had just given birth died of puerperal fever or diseases affecting the reproductive organs. Mortality rates have even reached 30%. Sometime in 1846, the Hungarian doctor Ignaz Semmelweis (Ignaz Semmelweis 1818 – 1865) revolutionized medicine by discovering the cause of death. Doctors often examined their patients with their bare hands, then went straight to the maternity ward to deliver the baby without even washing their hands.
Semleweis suggested the practice of washing hands with chlorinated lime solutions in 1847 while working at the first obstetrics clinic at the General Hospital of Vienna. Asking doctors to wash their hands dramatically reduced mortality rates from 30% to just 2%. This was discovered and applied by Semleweiss and thus earned him the title of father of modern antisepsis – the use of antimicrobial substances to reduce infections. Some also called him the Savior of mothers! But instead of praise for his discovery, Semleweis was treated with ingratitude. He was hated by his colleagues, who were offended by his implication that they were “killing” patients with their contaminated hands.
Tthe result was an increasingly toxic workplace surrounded the agile scientist until Semleweiss was fired, which pushed him to his limits: he suffered a nervous breakdown in 1865 and his colleagues – rubbing salt in the wounds of their ingratitude – banned him from a psychiatric hospital. There, Semleweiss lived for 14 days alone, like in a medieval dungeon: he was brutally beaten by the guards, resulting in a wound that turned into gangrene, which eventually killed him. Semleweiss died in 1865, aged 47, from an infection in his right hand. the pioneer doctor he was buried in a close family circle and his death was not even reported by the medical community. Semeleweiss’s discoveries were widely accepted only years after his death, when Louis Pasteur confirmed the theory of microbes, giving Semleweis’ observations a grounded theoretical explanation. And here the proverb applies: he taught them to swim and they drowned him…
DNA test for thieving scientists…
Today, the double helix is widely known as its representation DNA, even by many people who don’t understand how DNA works. However, until 1953, the structure of DNA remained an unsolved mystery. Since most people associate DNA with the name of a scientist, the ones that come to mind, for those who have read and know, are usually James Watson and Francis Crick, the duo who published for first time a complete article modeling the structure of the duplex. DNA helix.
Forgotten and almost ignored is a third noun – the most fundamental of the whole case: h Rosalind Franklin (Rosalind Franklin 1920 – 1958), a British scientist whose data was stolen by Watson and Crick.
Franklin’s contribution to the discovery of the structure of DNA remained largely unrecognized during her lifetime, and Franklin entered the history books as the “unsung heroine”, the “dark lady of DNA”, l “forgotten heroine” and the “Sylvia Plath”. of molecular biology.”
In 1951, the English biophysicist and the chemist-crystallographer Franklin began to study DNA. He soon discovered not only its density, but also that it existed in the form of a helical structure. Eventually he took x-rays which showed that the DNA was structured in a double helix. The discovery of the structure of DNA has helped other scientists understand how genetic information is passed from parents to children. Instead of applause and admiration, he received only ingratitude. A copy of Franklin’s article was presented by Watson and Crick, without his knowledge. In 1953, they announced in a photograph the discovery of the double helix structure of DNA, which gave rise to modern molecular biology.
Franklin’s work was published as the third in a series of three articles on DNA in the scientific journal Nature, with Watson and Crick’s publication only hinting at its contribution to their own work. However, Franklin’s important research work was recognized, even after his death. Watson and Crick eventually admitted that their discovery would have been impossible without Franklin’s data, but they didn’t bother to include his name in their scientific paper.
Franklin is dead of ovarian cancer at the age of 37, his contribution to one of the greatest scientific discoveries has been largely forgotten. Franklin should be not only famous, but rewarded for her work on X-ray diffraction images of DNA and in particular for the legendary “Photo 51”, taken by her student Raymond Gosling, which led to her discovery of double helix of DNA for which Francis Crick, James Watson and Maurice Wilkins shared the nobel in physiology or medicine in 1962.
And if it was forgotten somewhere on the shelves of history, Rosalind Franklin, Watson and Crick have not been forgotten, but another, Maurice Wilkins, who received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1962 and whose descendants sold the prizes years later… knowing they were “fake”!
Oh, don’t write and things that don’t add up: in April 2023, based on new evidence, scientists concluded that Franklin had contributed as an “equal player” to the process of DNA discovery, and not as she had been presented immediately after the discovery. And since the 1980s, there have been dozens of awards bearing Rosalind Franklin’s name, with the difference that she is dead and the dead do not smile, do not rejoice, do not cry, they are silent …
Yes yeson June 30, 2021, a Satellite named after her (Rosalind Franklin) launched into space, the best space to mark the limitless ingratitude of men!