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ESA's Rosalind Rover Is Rare Mission Named for a Woman - The Atlantic
The cosmos is crowded with the names of men, but a 2020 mission will make the balance a little less lopsided.
Magellan, Einstein, Newton, Planck, Euclid, Chandrasekhar, Fermi, Van Allen—these missions have provided scientists with heaps of information about the universe. And they are all named for men.
So it was a nice surprise when the European Space Agency recently announced that its next rover mission to Mars, launching in 2020, would bear the name of a woman: Rosalind Franklin, the English chemist whose work led to the discovery of the double-helical structure of DNA in the 1950s.
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The 'discoverers' of the double helix structure of DNA, Watson & Crick, for which they received a Nobel Prize are both pirates, IMO. They failed to share any of the credit with Franklin or with Jerry Donahue, the chemist who pointed out the keto-enol tautomerism of the purine & pyrimidine bases that make up DNA, the revelation that allowed them to build a correct model of the DNA double helix & then take all the credit.
The cosmos is crowded with the names of men, but a 2020 mission will make the balance a little less lopsided.
Magellan, Einstein, Newton, Planck, Euclid, Chandrasekhar, Fermi, Van Allen—these missions have provided scientists with heaps of information about the universe. And they are all named for men.
So it was a nice surprise when the European Space Agency recently announced that its next rover mission to Mars, launching in 2020, would bear the name of a woman: Rosalind Franklin, the English chemist whose work led to the discovery of the double-helical structure of DNA in the 1950s.
============================================
The 'discoverers' of the double helix structure of DNA, Watson & Crick, for which they received a Nobel Prize are both pirates, IMO. They failed to share any of the credit with Franklin or with Jerry Donahue, the chemist who pointed out the keto-enol tautomerism of the purine & pyrimidine bases that make up DNA, the revelation that allowed them to build a correct model of the DNA double helix & then take all the credit.