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)

External links modified

Hello fellow Wikipedians,

I have just modified 2 external links on Dorothy Maud Wrinch. Please take a moment to review my edit. If you have any questions, or need the bot to ignore the links, or the page altogether, please visit this simple FaQ for additional information. I made the following changes:

• Added {{dead link}} tag to http://macserver.ius.indiana.edu/humanities/philosophy/womeninphilosophy/searches/newsearch.acgi?author=Wrinch,%20Dorothy%20M.%20(See%20also%20Dorothy%20Wrinch%20Nicholson)&source_page=new
• Added archive https://web.archive.org/web/20051103022714/http://www2.sjsu.edu:80/depts/Museum/wri.html to http://www2.sjsu.edu/depts/Museum/wri.html
• Added archive https://web.archive.org/web/20130429114523/http://www.oup.com/us/catalog/general/subject/HistoryOther/HistoryofScience/?view=usa to http://www.oup.com/us/catalog/general/subject/HistoryOther/HistoryofScience/?view=usa&ci=9780199732593:

When you have finished reviewing my changes, please set the checked parameter below to true or failed to let others know (documentation at {{Sourcecheck}}).

This message was posted before February 2018. After February 2018, "External links modified" talk page sections are no longer generated or monitored by InternetArchiveBot. No special action is required regarding these talk page notices, other than regular verification using the archive tool instructions below. Editors have permission to delete these "External links modified" talk page sections if they want to de-clutter talk pages, but see the RfC before doing mass systematic removals. This message is updated dynamically through the template {{source check}} (last update: 18 January 2022).

• If you have discovered URLs which were erroneously considered dead by the bot, you can report them with this tool.
• If you found an error with any archives or the URLs themselves, you can fix them with this tool.

Cheers.—InternetArchiveBot (Report bug) 00:20, 16 December 2016 (UTC)

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)