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Grapefruit | Jan 05 2004

Rosalind Franklin

Last night I watched a television program called DNA: The Secret of Life. It was silly and manipulative, but I liked it anyway, in part because of how silly and manipulative it was. In my favorite scene, Maurice Wilkins, one of the scientists who lost the race fifty years ago to discover the structure of DNA, stares wistfully at a postcard of a sort of fairy dancer who is supposed to be, in Wilkins’s mind, his former colleague Rosalind Franklin. The idea is that if Wilkins had managed to collaborate with Franklin, they probably would have reached the answer first. But Wilkins was too diffident and Franklin too headstrong, so the prize went to the cheeky Watson and Crick, who were aided by the fact that Wilkins showed Watson one of Franklin’s crystallographic portraits of DNA, produced using a technique called X-ray diffraction. This is not a scientifically accurate account, nor does it have anything to do with whatever happened fifty years ago, but I liked the fact that the story kept coming back to the brilliant and tragic Franklin, who died of cancer at 37 and thus didn’t get to share in the Nobel prize, which is never awarded posthumously.

Near the end of the program, you see a computer-generated animation of DNA replicating itself. This animation looked totally weird and crazy, and it made me think by assocation about this awful thing that happens sometimes when I come, which is that I get fixated on what my body is doing at that moment, the internal contractions and such. It always freaks me out that my body somehow knows how to do these things, for it means that I have a body, which means that I will die. Coming equals body equals death. I don’t really put these thoughts together like this in the moment, but still it’s awful to feel this particular thing in this particular way instead of the usual way of simply enjoying it.

Related, though it may not appear so, Lisa wrote to tell me about some guy who sent her a creepy email about grapefruit. I wish I could quote it, but that would be wrong. Due to this grapefruit email, Lisa doesn’t feel comfortable advertising the reading we are doing next month together with our friend Blaise, which is sad because Lisa should be able to advertise her own reading without fear of lord knows what. Lisa wrote: Why are people crazy, Michael? Can you answer that question? I said that what amazes me (and this really is what amazes me) is that people aren’t a lot crazier than they are.