Talk:Dorothy Maud Wrinch

Tone
" He arranged a visiting professorship at three small Massachusetts colleges, Amherst College, Smith College, and Mount Holyoke College." Well, if you aren't American, you probably get the impression from this sentence that she paddled in backwaters. But any American conversant with academe knows that these are three of the top schools in the country. (Someone teaching at Balliol and Christ colleges in the UK could also be described as teaching at a couple of small schools on an island off the subcontinent of Europe.) I think the sentence needs re-wording.Kdammers (talk) 05:03, 15 January 2013 (UTC)

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Lack of training in chemistry
Article states: "In these debates Wrinch's lack of training in chemistry was a great weakness." The implication being, that the problem of her hypothesis was merely that she could not sufficiently defend her hypothesis against attacks by other scientists.

Lurking behind such assumptions are post-modern ideas assuming that reality is shaped by debates. When in fact the actual problem was that she developed a hypothesis about protein structure from a mathematically driven appreciation of symmetry, even though she lacked "training" (or: basic knowledge and experience) in chemistry. And (more importantly) the hypothesis was painfully not in agreement with reality.

Her cyclol hypothesis was almost immediately rejected (more or less explicitly) by specialists with such knowledge (Bergmann, Haurowitz, Pauling, Crowfoot Hodgkin etc). It was a fringe theory from the start and not based on good evidence. Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin is cited as stating: "We were both convinced it was wrong almost immediately in 1936 as we read up more protein chemistry and did experiments. But our arguments, of a chemical kind [...] did not convince her." (cited from M. Senechal, "I Died for Beauty")

Even in 1965 she had a paper in Nature (1965, Vol. 206, p. 459ff) in which she managed to not mention hydrogen bonds, but write about the "amide hypothesis" (i. e., the assumption that proteins are built of polypeptide chains) - which really was more than a hypothesis in 1965! The whole text of that paper is a lesson in eloquently writing about things one does not understand by amassing true statements from the literature, interwoven with allusions of shortcomings of existing theory and stating: "finding XX has already built a bridge between the necessarily hypothetical cyclol theory and the experimental facts". It is a bit like stating that the observation of horses and rhinos is already building a bridge to the necessarily (why?) hypothetical existence of unicorns...

In short, her lack of training in chemistry was not a weakness in defending the hypothesis. It would have been the decisive factor not to come up with a hypothesis about things one does not understand in the first place. 2001:9E8:32C1:A800:B85B:705B:A233:CB1C (talk) 20:43, 1 May 2024 (UTC)