Matthew Cobb

speaker

579 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Dec 2025 last heard 7 Dec

Matthew Cobb’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Dec 2025 with 1.

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Ground Truths · The Story of Francis Crick, a new masterpiece biography by Matthew Cobb · 7 Dec 2025 podcast

And he arrived in 1951 at Cambridge.

And he, too, was not working on DNA.

They were both working on protein structure, which is what they studied at Cambridge.

But Crick's very good friend, Morris Wilkins, had been working on DNA first using microscopes and then using X-ray crystallography for about six years.

Indeed, Crick nearly went and worked with him at King's College, Cambridge, London, but it didn't work out.

Now, so Crick knew what was happening all along in London because Wilkins would come along and they'd have dinner and have a drink and Wilkins would chat and he would also...

complain about Rosalind Franklin.

And because Franklin and Wilkins just didn't get on.

Wilkins was very introverted, very quiet, didn't like argument.

Franklin was very vivacious.

She came from an intellectual Jewish family that liked to have a good argument about anything, because that's the way you develop your ideas, you know?

So these two people just could not work together.

And that's part of the tragedy.

And Watson always said this, that if they'd been able to work together...

We talk about the Wilkins Franklin or Franklin Wilkins structure, not about Watson and Crick.

They would have been nowhere.

So there's been lots of problems, incredibly slow work in, in, in, in King's College, London.

And then.

At the end of 1952, they hear, the people in Cambridge hear, that Linus Pauling has produced a version of the structure of DNA.

And they knew this because Linus's son, Peter, happened to be doing his PhD in Cambridge in the same office as Watson and Crick.

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