Recorded: 01 Jan 2001
You know, with The Double Helix, one of the points that Jim has made very strongly is that he wrote what his recollections were, you know, what his impressions were, But, there were a couple of movie producers in Hollywood. There were a couple who broke up, I forgot their names now. But they were planning to do a movie about Rosalind Franklin and they were going to do in the sort of style of Roshomon that, you know, how different people recollect the same events. But, Jim’s recollections obviously have a connection with reality but not always the reality that other people involved had.
Donald Caspar, structural biologist and crystallographer, is a professor emeritus of Biological Sciences at the Institute of Molecular Biophysics at Florida State University in Tallahassee, Florida and is also a member of the National Academy of Sciences.
Born on January 8, 1927, he received his B.A. in Physics from Cornell University in 1950, and his his Ph.D. in Biophysics from Yale University in 1955. Caspar is interested in protein adaptability, virus assembly, protein plasticity and x-ray diffraction. He currently researches the mechanics of protein movements by executing structural studies.
He has attended many symposia at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, starting in 1961, and worked with Watson at Caltech and Harvard. He is a member of the National Academy of Science. Dr. Casper is a long-time friend and colleague of Dr. James D. Watson as well as many of the early pioneers in molecular biology, including Dr. Rosalind Franklin.