Francis Crick, co-discoverer of DNA structure, died today at 88
According to a Yahoo! article, Francis Crick, who co-discovered the double-helix structure of Deoxyribonucleic Acid (DNA, the building-blocks of almost all life) with James Watson in 1953, died today after a battle with colon cancer. It's hard to believe that DNA was first understood only 51 years ago. Much of modern medicine and molecular biology (and even some computer science) is derived from the work of Crick and Watson.
I first learned about Crick and Watson's work in a great book I read in a college Introduction to Biology class, The Double Helix, by James Watson. First-hand accounts of major scientific discoveries are rare, and well-written, interesting first-hand accounts are even more rare.
If you would like to honor Crick and his work, you can run one of the following non-profit screen-saver distributed computing projects on your workstation or PC to contribute to useful cancer and protein-folding research:
- Parabon Computation - colon cancer research and studies to ease the suffering of chemotherapy recipients
- grid.org - searching for cancer-fighting drugs
- Find-a-Drug - searching for cancer-fighting (and other disease-fighting) drugs
- Distributed Folding - researching how proteins "fold and assemble into living cells"
- Folding@home - researching how proteins self-assemble or fold
- Predictor@home - researching ways to predict protein structures from protein sequences
