Whipped Cream Difficulties

James Watson, DNA guy.

Dr. Watson’s role in decoding DNA, the genetic blueprint for life, would have been enough to establish him as one of the most important scientists of the 20th century. But he cemented that fame by leading the ambitious Human Genome Project and writing perhaps the most celebrated memoir in science.

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Dr. Watson’s tell-all memoir, “The Double Helix,” had also provoked his colleagues when it was published in 1968, infuriating them for, in their view, elevating himself while shortchanging others who were involved in the project. Still, it was instantly hailed as a classic of the literature of science. The Library of Congress listed it, along with “The Federalist Papers” and “The Grapes of Wrath,” as one of the 88 most important American literary works. (The list was later expanded to 100.)
But it was in discerning the double-helix physical structure of deoxyribonucleic acid, the chromosome-building molecule and medium of genetic inheritance, that won Dr. Watson and his co-discoverer, Francis H.C. Crick, enduring fame and the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1962.

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In 2007, Dr. Watson became the second person to have his full genome sequenced. The first was J. Craig Venter, who as president of the Celera Corporation started a human genome sequencing project originally in competition with the government effort. Both men made their genomes available to researchers.
Today, commercial concerns sell sequencing efforts to the public. And the double helix has entered popular culture. Its image has appeared on commercial products ranging from jewelry to perfume and on postage stamps issued by countries as various as Gabon and Monaco. Salvador Dalí incorporated the image in a painting, and the performance artists who make up Blue Man Group use the image in their shows.

John Cleary. You probably don’t recognize the name, but you might recognize the photo:

He was shot and seriously wounded at Kent State on May 4, 1970.

Following the shooting, Mr. Cleary spent weeks in a hospital and then moved back home. He returned to Kent State the following year to resume his studies. After graduating in 1974, he married his college sweetheart, Kathy Bashaw, and they settled near Pittsburgh.

Ed Moloney, historian of the Troubles.

In Mr. Moloney’s 2002 book “A Secret History of the I.R.A.,” he described the long conflict as “a low-intensity war that occasionally exploded into spectacular bursts of violence but more often was characterized by a killing or two a week, deaths that by the end had become so routine that they scarcely merited a headline outside of Ireland.”

I wanted to note his death because of this:

After moving to the Bronx in 2000 to help care for his mother-in-law, Mr. Moloney directed the Belfast Project at Boston College, a collection of audio interviews with paramilitary fighters on both sides of the Troubles conducted by two people, one a loyalist and the other a former I.R.A. volunteer who had served 17 years in prison for murder.
The tapes were to stay sealed until the interview subjects died. Mr. Moloney used interviews with two of them for his 2010 book, “Voices From the Grave: Two Men’s War in Ireland,” which was adapted into a documentary film of the same name that year.

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After the British government learned of the archives — which, among other things, implicated Mr. Adams in the McConville killing — it asked the Justice Department, under a mutual assistance legal treaty, to compel Boston College to turn over the tapes.
Under a federal subpoena, 11 of the 200 tapes were turned over in 2013. The college offered to return the tapes to the participants in the project and has done so in some cases, said Jack Dunn, a university spokesman. The archive is closed to the public.

Previously on WCD.

This entry was posted on Friday, November 7th, 2025 at 4:24 pm and is filed under History, Obits, Science. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.