April 25 Birthday
On April 25, 1945, American and Soviet troops met at the Elbe River near Torgau, Germany. The linkup split Nazi Germany in two — north and south — and effectively ended the war in Europe, which would conclude twelve days later. The meeting was photographed and filmed, and the images became symbols of Allied victory. The commanders, US First Army Lieutenant William Robertson and Soviet 58th Guards Rifle Division Lieutenant Alexander Silvashko, shook hands. The handshake was staged for the cameras but the linkup was real. The two armies had been fighting toward each other for months. This was the moment when the Eastern and Western fronts became one. The Elbe became the de facto boundary between the American and Soviet zones of occupation, which would harden into the Cold War border. Watson and Crick published their paper "Molecular Structure of Nucleic Acids: A Structure for Deoxyribose Nucleic Acid" in Nature on April 25, 1953. The paper was one page long. It described the double helix — two strands of nucleotides wound around each other, connected by complementary base pairs (adenine-thymine, guanine-cytosine). The paper ended with the understatement: "It has not escaped our notice that the specific pairing we have postulated immediately suggests a possible copying mechanism for the genetic material." The structure itself was based on Rosalind Franklin's X-ray crystallography data, which Watson and Crick obtained without her knowledge. Franklin's contribution was acknowledged in a footnote. She died of ovarian cancer in 1958, four years before Watson and Crick received the Nobel Prize. The Hubble Space Telescope was deployed from the cargo bay of Space Shuttle Discovery on April 25, 1990. Hubble had been in development since 1946, when astronomer Lyman Spitzer proposed a telescope above Earth's atmosphere. The telescope was delayed by the Challenger disaster and by budget overruns. After deployment, it was discovered that the primary mirror had been ground to the wrong shape — it was too flat by 2.2 microns, less than one-fiftieth the width of a human hair, but enough to make the images blurry. The flaw was fixed in 1993 by a servicing mission that installed corrective optics. Hubble has since taken over 1.5 million observations and transformed our understanding of the universe, including the discovery that the expansion of the universe is accelerating. Al Pacino, born this day in 1940, grew up in the South Bronx and studied at the Actors Studio under Lee Strasberg. He was twenty-nine when The Panic in Needle Park was his film debut. The Godfather came out when he was thirty-two. He received eight Oscar nominations before winning for Scent of a Woman (1992), in which he played a blind, angry retired colonel. He has never married. People born on April 25 fall under the zodiac sign of Taurus. The birthstone is Diamond and the birth flower is Daisy. Historical events on April 25 include 1945: US and Soviet troops link up at the Elbe River, splitting Germany in two, 1953: Watson and Crick publish DNA double helix paper in Nature, 1990: Hubble Space Telescope deployed from Space Shuttle Discovery. Famous people born on April 25 include Al Pacino (1940), Hank Azaria (1964), Renée Zellweger (1969).