You are viewing a single comment's thread from:
RE: The Great Kitchen Blender Experiments: How DNA was proved to be the seat of heredity
Another great science history post! When you mentioned that Martha Chase was omitted from the Nobel Prize, I looked into whether or not this was gender bias, or simply exclusion of a lab tech. Unfortunately, not much is know about her and her science career was cut short soon after so there isn't a definitive answer to this question.
http://www.themadscienceblog.com/2013/10/gender-bias-in-science-part-iv-martha.html
Just read the article. It's a good one. Kinda satisfying to read it just after I wrote this cos I feel somehow strangely vindicated, like "yeah, that's exactly how it happened". As if there was any debate! Also I have a crisply fresh understanding of the topics.
Also good to know more about Martha Chase. Her divorce and her reaction to it made me sad.
I also found the following passage interesting:
I thought that was dogma, unnecessary to be proved by experiment! It's also part of my whole "the survival instinct does not exist" idea: organisms cannot actively adapt to the environment, they merely present random mutations and survive or die according to whether the mutations are beneficial. If they were mutating in response to the environment that would create a vicious circle and it would be impossible to prove Darwin's theory since it would be tautological.
Yeah I thought gender bias at first as well, but then saw she was a lab technician, and thought, well, they probably won't give a lab technician a Nobel Prize.