There are two different kinds of discoveries in science. One kind of discovery emerges over years of work, and if the work involves experimentation, there are probably many, many experiments involved. The other sort of discovery happens in a moment, when somebody with the right expertise and instrumentation observes something unexpected or even unprecedented. Of course, they’ve probably spent years developing the right expertise, and maybe more setting up the circumstances in which they’re able to make their observation. But the observation itself is a point in time.
Science isn’t just a collaborative activity, but competitive as well. There is grant money to contend for, academic positions to apply to, and at least the hope of prizes to win. At the very top level, Nobel prizes involve competition that’s often fairly indirect. The Nobel committee reviews published papers and research results, but the scientists in the running for a prize can’t just contact the judges and make their case. But they know when they’re working on something that might qualify for a Nobel, and I think they tend to be pretty careful when announcing major findings. They’re careful about where the announcement is published, they’re careful about the evidence they present, and they’re careful about who is listed as an author, and in what order.
The history of February 28 includes an example of each kind of scientific discovery, and one of them led to a Nobel prize. But the competition leading up to the award might have strayed out of the bounds of strictly ethical practice. Let’s take a closer look.
It was February 28, 1953 that James Watson and Francis Crick announced — just informally, and only to their friends; their academic paper wouldn’t be published for another month — that after years of work they’d finally figured out the chemical structure of DNA. As nearly everybody now knows, the molecule is structured as a double helix. Their paper was published in Nature in April, and in 1962 Watson and Crick received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for their discovery. Maurice Wilkins shared in the prize as well; his contribution was in X-ray imagery that showed the double helix structure.
Another researcher, Rosalind Franklin, had also done significant X-ray imaging work on DNA, and her work, arguably, contributed more to Watson’s and Crick’s research than did Wilkins’. But Franklin was a woman, which may have had something to do with her omission. She never spoke out about it, but that may have been because she died in 1958, four years before the Nobel was awarded. By 1958 she was working on new research into X-ray imaging of viruses. She died (of ovarian cancer) the day before she was going to announce the structure of a virus at a conference. She missed out on another Nobel; her colleague Aaron Klug took over her leadership of the research team and continued the research. He won a Nobel for it in 1982.
There are several books you can read about the discovery of DNA’s structure. They all reveal a fairly tumultuous atmosphere among the top researchers in that field. The research team at King’s College London, where Franklin was, was working on the problem at the same time as Watson and Crick, who were at Cambridge. Some of the findings from the King’s College wound up with the Cambridge researchers — reports differ about whether this was ethical, and for that matter how much of a difference it made. The simplest, most memorable story is that “Watson and Crick discovered the double-helix structure of DNA in 1953”. But there are more complex, much longer stories that more closely match the truth. It was their publication that happened in 1953. The discovery really stretched over years, and there were more people involved. But there are so many of those longer, more complex stories that it’s very difficult to be sure about all the details. That’s probably the way it is with this kind of discovery; slow processes by many people, then an association with just one or two names. We just have to hope that they’re the right names.
An example of the other kind of discovery, the kind that happens all at once, is what happened on February 28, 1997. A gamma-ray flash visited the Earth for about 80 seconds. It came from another galaxy, over 8 billion light years away. It was the first evidence that gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) can happen outside our Milky Way galaxy. (If you want to look it up, this particular one was “GRB 970228.”)
Now, you obviously have to have the right equipment in place at the right time to detect a GRB. Nobody even knew about them until 1967, and then it was just by accident. In the early 1960s the US and the USSR signed a treaty limiting how nuclear weapons could be tested (and check today’s Born Today post; Linus Pauling won the Nobel Peace Prize for his work getting that treaty in place). No more stunts like blowing up whole islands would be allowed; it turned out the fallout irradiated entire countries.
When you ban something, you need some way to check for compliance. The answer was a group of satellites that could detect the radiation from a nuclear explosion — including gamma rays. The US put a dozen “Vela” satellites in orbit as test ban monitors. Then in 1967 two of the satellites detected bursts of gamma rays that didn’t fit any kind of nuclear explosion. It was eventually discovered that the bursts weren’t coming from our planet at all, but much, much farther away. That discovery led to placing specialized detectors on other satellites, specifically to do astronomical research.
So if you have the right equipment in the right place at the right time, you might accidentally make a completely new discovery. But it’s also worth asking whether we’re really talking about two different kinds of discoveries here. It took years to analyze the data from the Vela satellites and figure out where those gamma rays were coming from. Just like it took years to analyze the data about the structure of DNA. So maybe long, patient progress is the real truth of both kinds of discoveries. They just seem different because we tell two different kinds of stories about them.
