Wednesday, June 25, 2008
New contributor! YAY!
So you may have noticed that we are welcoming a new contributor into the fold here at RAZZY.org. Ho Rofra is my fellow sufferer in the Coordinated Doctoral Program in the Biomedical Sciences here at Columbia, my friend UnicornDick's girlfriend, and an all-around fun, funny-ass bitch. She was bored this week because UnicornDick is off at some "fantasy baseball conference," where I can only imagine he's trying to pull some egregiously wack trades with the guys in his league. He's probably trying to trade Mariners for A-Rod (and as much as I hate to bust on the Mariners or laud any Yankee, especially Alex Rodriguez, you can't say that wouldn't be a bullshit fantasy trade.) In our fantasy football league, UnicornDick was offering me a ridiculous trade every other day that always involved me giving up Ladanian Tomlinson and/or Antonio Gates for Brett Favre. Before even reviewing his trade offers I would get ready to type "SHA RIGHT." I wasn't the only one, either. All season he tried to get my buddy Neisman to trade Tom Brady, Randy Moss, and the Patriots D/ST for Favre. Ridiculous.
Anyway, since UnicornDick is off doing the baseball equivalent of that somewhere, Ho Rofra had some time on her hands to write, so I welcomed her to this elite literary collective of luminaries writing for this site. I also gave her a name: Ho Rofra, which is short for "Hotter Rosalind Franklin." If you're not a science geek, you probably have no idea who Rosalind Franklin was, but trust that at Smith College they were all over her story since she's the most burned hooker in the history of modern molecular biology. Back in the day, Rosalind was a post-doc in this guy Maurice Wilkins's lab doing X-ray diffraction of various DNA crystals. Don't ask how, because I don't know, but apparently by blasting a crystal of some molecule with X-rays and they scatter and somehow people who are better at biochemistry and math for me can look at the scatter pattern on a piece of film and deduce that molecule's structure. Well, that's what Rosalind was doing back in the fifties, and apparently she was a real drag to be around but she was the hotness when it came to crystallography. So to avoid talking to her cranky ass, James Watson and Francis Crick took a peek at some of her DNA diffraction data and saw this:
Apparently that means "double helix." In fact, the fact that that means "double helix" represents the only crystallography-type thing I know, because I've heard the story of how Watson and Crick fucked Rosalind Franklin over so many times. Again, don't ask me how this translates to "double helix," because I don't fuck with crystallography. I don't fuck around with things like "atoms" or "van der Waals forces" or any of that disturbingly math-physics-chemistry type stuff. Anyway, Watson and Crick took this and went back to their lab, where they picked up their "nitrogenous base" and "sugar backbone held together by phosphodiester bonds" puzzle set armed with this knowledge and Chargaff's rules, and came up with the structure of DNA. They rushed off a Nature paper, made one of the single most important contributions to the field of molecular biology ever, and were awarded the Nobel prize alongside Maurice Wilkins in 1962.
People at Smith used to get all hot and bothered because a woman–and a mousy, disagreeable one, no less–got screwed out of a Nobel prize, but ironically it was her own female bits that actually fucked her up. Rosalind Franklin died of ovarian cancer in 1958, and the Nobel prize isn't awarded posthumously. Watson later acknowledged that her data was essential in their discovery of DNA's structure, and that she probably would have made the trip to Stockholm with the boys club had she been alive.
So what does Rosalind Franklin have to do with Ho Rofra, you ask? Well, Ho Rofra, like Rosalind Franklin, works in a crystallography lab and I have no idea what she does. If you asked me, I'd probably just rattle off a bunch of scientastic nonsensical shit about transcription factors binding the major groove and TATA box binding protein that I vaguely remember from my first-year biochemistry class in 2003. Does it have anything to do with her project? Probably not, but like I said before, I'm not fucking with any damn diffraction patterns. Anyway, Ho Rofra is, like Rosalind Franklin, apparently really good at her job and solves crystal structures and whatever the hell else these hardcore biochemistry/biophysics types do. Except unlike Rosalind Franklin, she's actually attractive. Here's the best picture of Rosalind Franklin that's ever been taken:
Trust that Ho Rofra is WAAAAAAAAAY hotter. And she's probably funnier, too, considering I never got many chuckles out of Rosalind Franklin's Nature papers, which all have titles like "Influence of the bonding electrons on the scattering of X-rays by carbon" or "Location of the ribonucleic acid in the tobacco mosaic virus particle." So welcome to Ho Rofra! Leave her some comments!
Labels: Fantasia, grad school bullshit, Ho Rofra, nerd alert, science
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thanks for the shout-out, razzy.
+ there's something hella pervy about the part where you say "James Watson and Francis Crick took a peek at some of her DNA diffraction data and saw this".
+ there's something hella pervy about the part where you say "James Watson and Francis Crick took a peek at some of her DNA diffraction data and saw this".
Well, and seriously, I bet that diffraction pattern was way hotter than anything they could have peeked at under the original Rosalind Franklin's shimmy.
She couldn't win because she was already dead when it was awarded. Being dead renders you ineligible.
As I understand it, she was not a post-doc, but an indendent PI. Post-doc's do not get Nobel honors, or every prize given out would be shared by post-docs and students with the PI.
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As I understand it, she was not a post-doc, but an indendent PI. Post-doc's do not get Nobel honors, or every prize given out would be shared by post-docs and students with the PI.
# posted by 
: 6/26/2008 7:37 AM
: 6/26/2008 7:37 AM Links to this post:
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