February 28 Birthday
On February 28, 1953, James Watson and Francis Crick announced at the Eagle pub in Cambridge that they had "found the secret of life." They had constructed a model of the DNA molecule as a double helix, with two strands connected by complementary base pairs. Their discovery was published in Nature on April 25, 1953, in a one-page paper. The data that made the model possible came from Rosalind Franklin's X-ray crystallography, which Watson and Crick obtained without her knowledge. Franklin died of cancer in 1958, at thirty-seven. Watson and Crick received the Nobel Prize in 1962. The double helix is the most important biological discovery of the 20th century, and the credit for it is still contested. Olof Palme, the Prime Minister of Sweden, was assassinated on February 28, 1986, as he walked home from a movie theater with his wife. He had no bodyguards — Swedish prime ministers routinely walked unaccompanied. The killer shot him in the back at close range and disappeared into the night. The murder was never officially solved. The investigation cost $50 million, employed 90 officers full-time, and produced 134,000 pages of reports. A suspect was convicted in 1989 but acquitted on appeal. The gun was never found. Palme was a prominent critic of both the United States and the Soviet Union, an opponent of apartheid, and an advocate for nuclear disarmament. His assassination ended Sweden's tradition of unarmed prime ministers. NATO conducted its first combat operation on February 28, 1994, when US F-16 fighters shot down four Bosnian Serb jets that had violated the UN no-fly zone over Bosnia. The jets had been bombing a munitions factory. The no-fly zone had been imposed in 1993 but had not been enforced until this incident. The shoot-down was a turning point in the Bosnian War — it demonstrated that NATO was willing to use force, and it led to further airstrikes that eventually forced the Bosnian Serbs to the negotiating table. The Dayton Accords, signed in December 1995, ended the war. Linus Pauling, born this day in 1901, is the only person to have won two unshared Nobel Prizes — Chemistry in 1954 and Peace in 1962. He discovered the nature of the chemical bond, the structure of proteins, and the cause of sickle cell anemia. He was also one of the most prominent advocates for nuclear disarmament, and his activism led to his passport being revoked by the State Department in 1952, preventing him from attending a scientific conference in London where he might have seen Franklin's DNA data. He lived to be ninety-three. People born on February 28 fall under the zodiac sign of Pisces. The birthstone is Amethyst and the birth flower is Violet. Historical events on February 28 include 1953: Watson and Crick announce discovery of DNA double helix structure, 1986: Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme assassinated in Stockholm, 1994: NATO conducts first combat action, shooting down four Bosnian Serb jets. Famous people born on February 28 include Linus Pauling (1901), Bernadette Peters (1948), John Turturro (1957).