Cheating

 

cheat (v.)

mid-15c., "to escheat, to seize as an escheat," a shortening of Old French escheat, legal term for revision of property to The State when The Owner dies without heirs, literally "that which falls to one," past participle of escheoir "happen, befall, occur, take place; fall due; lapse (legally)," from Late Latin *excadere "fall away, fall out," from Latin ex- "out" (see ex-) + cadere "to fall" (from PIE root *kad- "to fall").

Also compare escheat. The royal officers who had charge of  escheats evidently had a reputation for unscrupulousness, and the meaning of the verb evolved through "confiscate" (mid-15c.) to "deprive unfairly" (1580s), to "deceive, impose upon, trick" (1630s). 

Intransitive sense "act dishonestly, practice fraud or trickery" is from 1630s. To cheat on (someone) "be sexually unfaithful" is attested by 1934. 

Related: Cheated; cheating.

cheat (n.)

late 14c., "forfeited property, reversion of property to a lord," from cheat (v.) or from escheat (n.). 

Meaning "a fraud committed by deception, a deceptive act" is from 1640s; earlier, in thieves' jargon, it meant "a stolen thing" (late 16c.), and earlier still "dice" (1530s). 

It also was used in canting slang generally, as an affix, for any "thing" (e.g. cackling-chete "a fowl," crashing-chetes "the teeth"). 

Meaning "a swindler, a person who cheats" is from 1660s; from 1680s as "anything which deceives or is intended to deceive."

Entries linking to cheat

ex- 

word-forming element, in English meaning usually "out of, from," but also "upwards, completely, deprive of, without," and "former;" from Latin ex "out of, from within; from which time, since; according to; in regard to," from PIE *eghs "out" (source also of Gaulish ex-, Old Irish ess-, Old Church Slavonic izu, Russian iz). In some cases also from Greek cognate ex, ek. PIE *eghs had comparative form *eks-tero and superlative *eks-t(e)r-emo-. Often reduced to e- before -b-, -d-, -g-, consonantal -i-, -l-, -m-, -n-, -v- (as in elude, emerge, evaporate, etc.).

*kad- 

Proto-Indo-European root meaning "to fall." 

It forms all or part of : accident; cadaver; cadence; caducous; cascade; case (n.1); casual; casualty; casuist; casus belli; chance; cheat; chute (n.1); coincide; decadence; decay; deciduous; escheat; incident; occasion; occident; recidivist. 

It is the hypothetical source of/evidence for its existence is provided by : Sanskrit sad- "to fall down;" Latin casus "a chance, occasion, opportunity; accident, mishap," literally "a falling," cadere "to fall, sink, settle down, decline, perish;" Armenian chacnum "to fall, become low;" perhaps also Middle Irish casar "hail, lightning."

escheat

cheating

cheater

escheat (n.)

the reverting of land to a King or Lord in certain cases, early 14c., from Anglo-French eschete (late 13c.), Old French eschete "succession, inheritance," literally "that which FALLS to one," noun use of fem. past participle of escheoir "happen, befall, occur, take place; fall due; lapse (legally)," from Late Latin *excadere "to fall out," from Latin ex "out, away" (see ex-) + cadere "to fall" (from PIE root *kad- "to fall"). As a verb, from late 14c. 

Related : Escheated; escheating. 

Late Latin *excadere represents a restored form of excidere, which yielded excise.

During five years of war 

the illustrious Frederick 

had so exhausted the males of His Kingdom 

that he had to employ recruiters who would 

commit any crime, including 

kidnapping to keep 

supplied those brilliant regiments 

of his with cannon fodder. 

Captain Potzdorf :

Good evening, sir. I'm Captain Potzdorf. 

To whom have I the honour of speaking? 

Lieutenant Fakenham :

Good evening. I'm Lieutenant Fakenham, 

Gale's Regiment of Foot. 

Pleased to meet you. Can we be of assistance to you? 

Lieutenant Fakenham :

Thank you, but I am carrying urgent despatches 

and must continue on my way. 

Captain Potzdorf :

And your destination? 

Lieutenant Fakenham :

Bremen. 

Captain Potzdorf :

Then you're obviously lost, Lieutenant. 

Bremen is in the opposite direction. 

Lieutenant Fakenham :

Are you sure? 

Captain Potzdorf :

Yes. 

Lieutenant Fakenham :

Wouldn't you know it! My departure was so hasty that my orderly forgot to prepare proper maps. 

Captain Potzdorf :

I understand. Please, do not be offended, Lieutenant,

but are you carrying your identity papers? 

Lieutenant Fakenham :

Yes, of course. 

Captain Potzdorf :

May I see them? 

Lieutenant Fakenham :

Of course. 

Captain Potzdorf :

Thank you. 

Thank you, Lieutenant, I hope 

I haven't inconvenienced you. 

Lieutenant Fakenham :

Not at all. 

Captain Potzdorf :

Now that we are riding in the same direction,

may I offer you a meal and a bed for the night 

and a proper map for the journey? 

Lieutenant Fakenham :

That's kind of you, Captain. 

I'd be honoured to accept. 

Barry was treated with great civility 

and was asked questions about England. 

He answered as best he could, 

inventing many stories. 

He described the King and Ministers,

boasted that the British Ambassador 

in Berlin was his uncle and even offered 

Potzdorf a letter of introduction. 

His host seemed satisfied with these stories. 

But, he led Barry on with a skillful combination 

of questions and flattery. 

Captain Potzdorf :

I know so little of your country of England -- 

except that you are the bravest nation in the world

and that we are fortunate to have such allies. 

Lieutenant Fakenham, let us drink to the friendship of our two great nations. 

Lieutenant Fakenham :

To our two great nations. 

Aren't you lucky, going to Bremen tomorrow? 

I know one of the loveliest women in Europe there. Would you take a letter to her? 

Lieutenant Fakenham :

Certainly. 

Captain Potzdorf :

By the way, to whom are you carrying your despatches? 

Lieutenant Fakenham :

General Williamson. 

Captain Potzdorf :

General Williamson? General Percival Williamson? 

Barry :

Yes, the same. 

Captain Potzdorf :

This man is under arrest. 

Barry :

Under arrest? Captain Potzdorf, sir... 

I'm a British Officer. 

Captain Potzdorf :

You're A Liar and 

An Imposter. You're A Deserter. 

I suspected you this morning. 

Your lies and folly have confirmed this. 

You pretend to carry despatches to 

a General, dead these ten months. 

You say The British Ambassador in Berlin 

is Your Uncle, with the ridiculous name of O'Grady. 

Now, will you Join and take The Bounty, or be given up? 

Barry :

I volunteer. 

The Prussian Service was worse than the English. 

The life of a Private Soldier was frightful. 

Punishment was incessant. 

Every Officer had the right to inflict it. 

The gauntlet was a common penalty for minor offences. 

More serious ones were punishable by mutilation or death. 

At the close of the Seven Years' War The Army, 

renowned for its disciplined valour, 

was officered by native Prussians. 

But it was mostly composed of men from the lowest levels of humanity hired or stolen from every nation in Europe. 

Thus, Barry fell into the worst company and 

was soon far advanced in the science 

of every kind of misconduct. 

Captain Potzdorf :

Help. Get me out of here. 

The Colonel's speech declared The King's satisfaction 

with the conduct of the Regiment at the Battle of Audorf,

and with Corporal Barry's bravery 

in rescuing Captain Potzdorf which was 

to be rewarded with the sum of two frederick d'or. 

The Colonel :

Corporal Barry, eight paces forward march! 

Corporal Barry. You're a gallant soldier, 

and evidently of good stock

but you're idle and unprincipled. 

You're a bad influence on the men. 

And for all your bravery, 

I'm sure you'll come to no good. 

Barry :

I hope The Colonel is mistaken. 

I have fallen into bad company, 

but I've only done as other soldiers do. 

I've never had A Friend or Protector before,

to show that I was worthy of better things. 

The Colonel may say I'm ruined, and send me to the Devil. 

But, I would go to the Devil to serve the Regiment. 

Corporal Barry, fall in. 

The war ended and Barry's regiment was garrisoned in the Capital. He had, for some time, ingratiated himself with Captain Potzdorf, whose confidence in him was about to bring its reward. 

Captain Potzdorf :

Good morning, Redmond. 

Good morning, Captain. 

Captain Potzdorf :

I should like you to meet my uncle, the Minister of Police. 

Good morning, Herr Minister. 

Captain Potzdorf :

Redmond... ...I've spoken to The Minister regarding your services and your fortune is made. 

We shall get you out of the Army,

appoint you to The Police Bureau, and, in time,

we'll allow you to move in a better sphere. 

Thank you, Captain. 

Captain Potzdorf :

Your loyalty to Me and service 

to the Regiment has pleased me. 

Now there is another occasion on which you can assist us. 

If you succeed your reward will be secure. 

Barry :

I'll do my best, sir. 

There is a gentleman in Berlin in the service of The Empress of Austria. He calls himself The Chevalier de Balibari. 

He appears to be a professional gambler. 

He's a libertine : Fond of women, 

of good food polished, obliging. 

He speaks French and German indifferently. 

But we have reason to fancy that 

Monsieur de Balibari is a native 

of your country of Ireland. 

And that he has come here as A Spy. 

Your knowledge of English makes you 

an ideal choice to go into his service 

and find out whether or not he is A Spy. 

Does this assignment interest you? 

Barry :

Minister, I'm interested in anything 

that can be of service to you

and Captain Potzdorf. 

Captain Potzdorf :

You will not know a word of English. 

If the Chevalier remarks on your accent, 

say you are Hungarian. You served in the war. 

You left the Army for medical reasons, then served 

Monsieur de Quellenberg for two years. 

He's now with the Army in Silesia, 

but you'll have a certificate from him. 

******

Barry :

Good morning, Your Honour. 

The Chevalier du Bari-Bari :

So you are the young man recommended by Seebach. 

Barry :

Yes, Your Honour, here are my credentials. 

The Chevalier du Bari-Bari :

Your Name is Lazlo Zilagy? 

Barry :

Yes, Your Honour. 

Monsieur de Quellenberg recommends you highly. 

Barry :

Monsieur is a very good man. 

It was imprudent of him but when Barry saw 

The Chevalier's splendour and noble manner 

he felt unable to keep disguise with him. 

Those who have never been exiled 

know not what it is to hear 

a friendly voice in captivity 

and would not understand the cause

of the burst of feeling now about to take place. 

The Chevalier du Bari-Bari :

You seem the right one to me. 

Barry :

Thank you, Your Honour. 

The Chevalier du Bari-Bari :

Are you ill? 

Barry :

Sir... 

...I have a confession to make to you. 

I'm an Irishman. My name is Redmond Barry. 

I was abducted into The Prussian Army. 

Now I've been put into Your Service 

by my Captain Potzdorf and his uncle, 

The Minister of Police, to serve as A Watch 

upon your actions, and to give Information to them. 

The Chevalier was much affected 

at thus finding one of his countrymen. 

For he too was an exile. And a friendly voice, 

a look brought the old country back to his memory. 

Barry :

He is very religious and attends church regularly. 

After Mass he comes home for breakfast. 

He then takes an airing in his carriage. 

Barry presented his reports regularly to The Minister. 

The details were arranged 

beforehand with the Chevalier. 

He was instructed to tell The Truth 

as much as his story would possibly bear. 

The Information he gave was 

very minute and accurate 

though not very important. 

Barry :

Wine or punch, Your Honour? 

Wine. 

It was agreed that Barry should 

keep his character of valet. 

That, before strangers, he should 

not know a word of English. 

And that he should keep a lookout 

on the trumps when serving the wine. 

Having excellent eyesight 

and a natural aptitude

he was able to give his dear patron 

much assistance against 

his opponents at the green table. 

If, for instance, he wiped the table with a napkin

the enemy was strong in Diamonds. 

If he adjusted a chair it meant Ace/King. 

If he said, "Punch or wine, My Lord?"

Hearts were meant, and so forth. 

The Prince of Tübingen who had intimate connections 

with the Great Frederick was passionately fond of Play 

as were the gentlemen of almost 

all the Courts of Europe. 

The Chevalier du Bari-Bari :

You owe 2000 Frederick d'or. 

Chevalier... though I cannot say how... 

I believe you have cheated Me. 

The Chevalier du Bari-Bari :

I deny Your Grace's accusation and beg you 

to say how you have been cheated. 

I don't know. 

But I believe I have been. 

The Chevalier du Bari-Bari :

Your Grace owes me 2000 Frederick d'or,

which I have honourably won. 

Chevalier -- if you will have Your Money now 

You must fight for it. 

If you will be patient, maybe 

I will pay you something another time. 

The Chevalier du Bari-Bari :

Your Grace, if I am to be so tame as to take this,

then I must give up an honourable and lucrative occupation. 

I have said all there is to be said. 

I am at your disposal for whatever 

purposes you wish. Good night. 

********

Captain Potzdorf :

Was The Prince cheated? 

In as far as I am able to tell, Herr Minister, no. 

I believe he won the money fairly. 

Captain Potzdorf :

What are the Chevalier's intentions? 

I'm not sure. The Prince told him 

that if he wanted his money 

he'd have to fight for it.  

********

Captain Potzdorf :

A Meeting with The Prince is impossible. 

Barry :

The Prince has left him no other choice. 

Captain Potzdorf :

Will you be able to return here tomorrow 

without arousing suspicion? 

*********

The Chevalier du Bari-Bari :

I know They won't allow A Meeting with The Prince. 

But if I say that, Do You Know Any Reason 

why he'll pay me What He Owes? 

You must tell Them I intend 

to demand Satisfaction. 

Don't look so downcast, my boy --

They cannot harm me, 

The Austrian Embassy will see to that. 

The worst They can do is send me 

out of this dreary country of Theirs. 

If they should, don't worry -- 

You shall not be left behind. 

Have no fear of that. 

*********

Captain Potzdorf :

The King has determined to send 

The Chevalier out of The country. 

Has he already demanded Satisfaction? 

Not yet, but I believe he intends to... 

...possibly Today. 

Captain Potzdorf :

Then this must be done tomorrow. 

All the arrangements are made. 

You said he takes a drive 

after breakfast every day. 

Yes, sir. 

Captain Potzdorf :

Is there any reason he should do 

any different tomorrow? 

No, sir. 

Captain Potzdorf :

Good. When The Chevalier comes out 

to his carriage in The Morning,

Two Officers will meet him 

and escort him to The Frontier. 

His baggage will be sent after him. 

Excellent. 

At ten o'clock the next morning, 

The Chevalier de Balibari went out 

for his regular morning drive. 

The Chevalier du Bari-Bari :

Where's My Servant, Lazlo? 

Two Prussian Officers :

I will let down the steps, Your Honour. 

The Chevalier du Bari-Bari :

What is this about? 

Two Prussian Officers :

Please get inside. 

The Chevalier du Bari-Bari :

Am I under arrest? 

Two Prussian Officers :

We're driving to The Frontier. 

The Chevalier du Bari-Bari :

Frontier? But I'm on my way to 

The Austrian Ambassador's House. 

Two Prussian Officers :

My Orders are to escort you to The Frontier... 

...and see you safely across The Border. 

The Chevalier du Bari-Bari :

But, I'm not going to The Frontier. 

I have very important business at 

The Austrian Ambassador's House. 

Two Prussian Officers :

My Orders are to take Your Honour 

to The Frontier by any means necessary. 

If you come willingly,

I'm to give you this purse on behalf 

of The Prince of Tübingen,

containing 2000 Frederick d'or. 

The Chevalier du Bari-Bari :

All Europe shall hear of this.

 
And so, without Papers or Passport, 
and under the eyes of Two Prussian Officers

Barry was escorted across the frontier 

into Saxony and Freedom. 

The Chevalier himself had uneventfully 

crossed The Frontier the night before. 

By these wonderful circumstances, 

Barry was once more Free and began 

his professional work as A Gamester,

resolving, thenceforward and forever, 

to live The Life of a Gentleman. 

The four wins. 

Soon he and The Chevalier were received 

in all the Courts of Europe and 

were speedily in the very best Society, 

where Play was patronised, 

and Professors of that Science 

always welcome. 

Lord Ludd :

The seven. Why not the seven? 

All...all, yes. No more bets. 

Number seven... loses. 

Place Your Bets. 

Lord Ludd :

Chevalier, will you give me credit 

for 5000 Louis D'Or, please? 

Of course, Lord Ludd. Five thousand. 

Now, everything on the four. 

Lord Ludd :

Yes, I know, everything on the four. 

No more bets. The four loses. 

Lord Ludd :

It is not important. Now, I'm weary. 

I would like dinner. Shall we? 

Excuse me, Lord Ludd. 

If you don't mind. Not at all. 

They always played on credit with 

any person of honour or noble lineage. 

They never pressed for their winnings,

or declined to receive promissory notes. 

But woe to The Man who did not pay 

when the note became due. 

Barry was sure to wait upon him with his bill. 

There were few bad debts. 

Lord Ludd :

Saluez. 

It was Barry's skill with The Sword, and readiness to use it 

that maintained the reputation of The Firm, so to speak. 

On guard! 

Lord Ludd (DEEP, Masculine Voice) :

I will pay you today, sir. 

Thus, it will be seen, their life,

for all its splendour, was not without 

Danger and Difficulty, requiring 

Talent and Determination for Success.

 

And required them to live a 

wandering and disconnected life. 

And, though they were swimming upon 

the high tide of fortune and 

prospering with The Cards, they had 

little to show for their labour, 

but some fine clothes 

and a few trinkets. 

Five years in The Army, and considerable 

experience of The World had 

dispelled any romantic notions 

regarding Love with which 

Barry commenced life. 

And he had it in mind, as many gentlemen 

had done before him, to marry 

A Woman of Fortune and Condition. 

And, as such things so often happen,

these thoughts coincided with 

his setting sight upon A Lady, who will play 

a considerable part in the drama of his life. 

The Countess of Lyndon, Viscountess 

Bullingdon of England,
Baroness Castle Lyndon of Ireland. 
A Woman of vast wealth and great beauty. 
She was The Wife of Sir Charles Lyndon, 

Knight of The Bath, Minister to George III 

at several of the Courts of Europe. 

A Cripple, wheeled about in a chair, 

worn out by gout and a myriad of diseases. 

Her Ladyship's Chaplain, Mr. Runt, 

acted as tutor to her son, 

the little Viscount Bullingdon, 

a melancholy little boy, much-

attached to His Mother. 

I'm going outside for a breath of air. 

Yes, My Lady. 

To make a long story short, 

six hours after they met,

Her Ladyship was in love. 

And once Barry got into her company,

he found innumerable occasions 

to improve his intimacy,

and was scarcely out of 

Her Ladyship's sight. 

Barry :
Good evening, gentlemen. Sir Charles.

Sir Charles Lyndon, 

Lord Bullingdon : 
Good evening, Mr. Barry. 

Have you done with My Lady? 

Barry :

Pardon? 

Sir Charles Lyndon, 

Lord Bullingdon :

Come, sir. I'm A Man who would 

rather be known as A Cuckold 

than A Fool. 

I think, Sir Charles, that you've had 
too much to drink. 

What? 

As it happens, Your Chaplain, Mr. Runt, 

introduced Me to Your Lady to advise Me on 

a religious matter, of which she is an expert. 

Sir Charles Lyndon, 

Lord Bullingdon :

He wants... to step into My Shoes. 
He wants to step into MY Shoes. 

Is it not a pleasure for me, 
as I am drawing near The Goal, 
to find My Home such a happy one, 

My Wife so fond of me, that she is even now 

thinking of appointing A Successor? 
Isn't it a comfort to see her 

like a prudent housewife 

getting everything ready 

for my departure?

 
I hope you're not thinking 

of leaving us, Sir Charles? 

Sir Charles Lyndon, 

Lord Bullingdon :

Not so soon as you may fancy, perhaps. 
I've been given over many times these four years. 
And there was always a candidate or two

waiting to apply for The Situation. 

I'm sorry for you, Mr. Barry. It grieves me 

to keep you or any gentleman waiting. 

Had you not better arrange with My Doctor or have 

The Cook flavour My Omelette with arsenic, eh? 

What are the odds, gentlemen, that I live 

to see Mr. Barry hang yet? 

Barry :

Sir, let those laugh that win. Gentlemen. 

I'll get a surgeon. 

Have some brandy, Sir Charles. 

From a report in 
The Saint James' Chronicle: 

"Died at Spa in Belgium, 
Sir Charles Reginald Lyndon, 
Knight of The Bath, 

Member of Parliament, 
and for many years 

His Majesty's Representative 

at various European Courts. 
He has left behind him A Name which is 

endeared to all His Friends. " 

The Rev. Samuel Runt (CofE) :
Dearly Beloved, We are gathered together 
here in The Sight of God, and 

in The Face of This Congregation

to join together this Man 

and this Woman 
in Holy Matrimony.

A Year later, on the fifteenth 

of June in the year 1773, 

Redmond Barry had The Honour 
to lead to the altar 

The Countess of Lyndon. 
The ceremony was performed 

by The Reverend Runt, 
Her Ladyship's Chaplain.

The Rev. Samuel Runt (CofE) :
And therefore is not in any way to be enterprised, 

nor taken in hand unadvisedly, lightly or wantonly

to satisfy men's carnal lusts and appetites 

like brute beasts that have no understanding;

But reverently, discreetly, advisedly, 

soberly, and in The Fear of God. 

Duly considering The Causes 

for which matrimony was ordained. 

First, it was ordained for 

The Procreation of Children 
to be brought up in the Fear 

and Nurture of The Lord, and to 

The Praise of His Holy Name. 

Secondly it was ordained for 

A Remedy against Sin, 
and to avoid Fornication.

Barry had now arrived at the pitch of Prosperity
and by His Own Energy had raised himself 
to a higher sphere of Society having procured 
His Majesty's gracious permission to add 

The Name of his lovely Lady to His Own. 
Thenceforth, Redmond Barry assumed 
The Style and Title of Barry Lyndon. 

Lady Lyndon :
Redmond, would you mind 

not smoking for a while?

Lady Lyndon was soon destined 

to occupy a place in Barry's Life 

not very much more important 

than the elegant carpets and pictures 

which would form the pleasant 

background of his existence. 

The Rev. Samuel Runt :

My Lord Bullingdon, you seem particularly glum today? 

You should be happy that Your Mother has remarried. 

My Lord Bullingdon :

Not in this way. 

And not in such haste. 

And certainly not to this man. 

The Rev. Samuel Runt :

I think you judge Your Mother too harshly. 

Do you not like your new Father? 

My Lord Bullingdon :

Not very much. 

He seems to Me little more than 

a common opportunist. 

I don't think he loves my mother at all. 

And it hurts me very much, 

to see her make such A Fool of herself. 

At the end of a year Her Ladyship 

presented Barry with A Son.

Bryan Patrick Lyndon, 

they called him. 

Her Ladyship and Barry lived, 

after a while, pretty separate. 
She preferred quiet, or to say The Truth, 

he preferred it for her, being a great friend 

to a modest and tranquil behaviour in Woman. 

Besides, She was A Mother, and 

would have great comfort
in the dressing, educating and 

dandling of their little Bryan --

For whose sake it was fit, Barry believed, 

that she should give up the pleasures and 

frivolities of the world, leaving that part 

of the duty of every family of distinction 

to be performed by him. 

Lady Lyndon tended to a melancholy and maudlin 

temper and, left alone by her husband, 

was rarely happy or in good humour. 

Now she must add jealousy to her other complaints,
and find rivals even among her maids. 

Lady Lyndon :

Samuel, what would the time be?

The Rev. Samuel Runt (CofE) : 

Twenty-five minutes past eleven, My Lady. 

Lady Lyndon :

Shall we make this the last game, ladies? 

Barry Lyndon :

Good morning, ladies. 

Would you mind excusing us? 

I'd like a word alone with 

Lady Lyndon. I'm sorry. 

The Tailor :

This coat is made of the finest velvet,
all cunningly worked with silver thread. 
No finer velvet has ever been woven, 
and you will see none better anywhere. 

Barry Lyndon :

Pardon me, Gentlemen. 

Good morning, dearest. 

Lady Lyndon :
We're taking the children for a ride to The Village. 
We'll be back for tea. 

Barry Lyndon :

Have a nice time. I'll see you then. 
Goodbye, little Bryan. Lord Bullingdon. 
Take Good Care of Your Mother. 

Lady Lyndon :

Come now, give Your Father a proper kiss. 
Lord Bullingdon -- is that the way 

to behave to Your Father? 
Lord Bullingdon, have you lost your tongue? 

My Lord Bullingdon :

My Father was Sir Charles Lyndon. 
I have not forgotten him, if others have.

Lady Lyndon : 
Lord Bullingdon, You have 

insulted Your Father! 

My Lord Bullingdon :

Madam, you have insulted My Father.

Barry Lyndon : 
Dearest, would you excuse us? 
We have something to discuss in private. 

Gentlemen. 

Barry Lyndon :

One. Two. Six. 
Lord Bullingdon -- I have always been willing 

to Live with You on friendly terms. 

But be clear about one thing : 

As Men Serve me, I Serve them. 

I never laid a cane on the back of A Lord before --

but, if you force me to, I shall speedily 

become used to the practice. 

Do you have anything to say for yourself? 

My Lord Bullingdon :

No. 

Barry Lyndon :

You may go. 

Barry believed, and not without some reason, 

that it had been a Declaration of War 

against him by Bullingdon from the start, 

and that the evil consequences that ensued

were entirely of Bullingdon's creating. 

Magician :
I shall make you into a real magician now, Bryan. 

I shall show you The Knot that never was. 

As Bullingdon grew up to be A Man, 

his hatred for Barry assumed an intensity

equalled only by his increased 

devotion to His Mother. 

Kubrick :

"I believe Thackeray used Redmond Barry 

to tell his own story in a deliberately distorted way 

because it made it more interesting. 

Instead of The Omniscient Author, 

Thackeray used The Imperfect Observer, 

or perhaps it would be more accurate to say 

The Dishonest Observer, thus allowing The Reader 

to judge for himself, with little difficulty, the probable 

Truth in Redmond Barry's view of his life. 

This technique worked extremely well in the novel 

but, of course, in a film you have objective reality 

in front of you all of the time, so the effect of 

Thackeray's first-person story-teller 

could not be repeated on the screen. 

It might have worked as comedy by the juxtaposition of 

Barry's version of The Truth with 

The Reality on The Screen, 

but I don't think that Barry Lyndon 

should have been done as A Comedy.

Life Story

BBC Horizon - The Race for the Double Helix

14,662 views  Premiered on 15 Mar 2022  #NOVA #BBC #Horizon

 Author Isaac Asimov joins NOVA in the retelling of the remarkable story of the discovery of the structure of DNA. James Watson and his ex-colleague Francis Crick exchange memories of the events which led to their winning the race for the structure of the gene.

#NOVA #BBC #Horizon #Documentary

Music] why does a calf look like its mother well for that matter why do cows always produce calves and not rabbits or camels i suppose you could say it's because they always do but that's really not a scientific explanation a scientist wants to know the details of inheritance [Music] this straw contains bull sperm each straw contains 25 million sperm and yet one of those sperm is enough to fertilize a cow and produce a new individual a new individual with four legs ahead all the details right and different from any other cow all that information or at least half of it has to be contained in the head the minute head of these very tiny sperm that shows that it must be written in a very minute language it must be written in some way in a chemical language not only that when the egg has been fertilized it divides into two into four into eight produces millions of cells in each one of those cells there's a copy a precise copy of all that genetic information when i left physics 25 years ago it seemed to me that these two problems how you store genetic information in such a small space and how you copied it exactly every time a cell divided they seem to me the two most important problems in biology at that time a young american james watson from harvard and two englishmen francis crick from cambridge and morris wilkins from london were awarded the 1962 nobel prize for medicine they discovered the nature of the inheritance chemical dna or deoxyribonucleic acid doing the research that led to this nobel prize needed outstanding imagination but before the moment of elation there were blunders frustration insights personal conflicts between colleagues a sense of competition [Music] this film is the story of the process of discovery [Music] cambridge in the early 1950s was the setting for watson and crick's part in the dna story cambridge after the war was rather an exciting place because a lot of us young and not so young had come back to do biological research i myself was doing cell biology there were a lot of other people in that general area there was a lot of interest in the chemistry of life and foremost amongst the characters around the place was of course francis crick and jim watson on the face of it francis crick and james watson were a rather improbable pair to solve what was then the most important problem in biology because crick was already about 35 he hadn't even finished his own doctoral thesis though i can't say i remember he was remarkably good at giving advice on to other people on solving their doctoral thesis um and watson was a very bright young man american who hadn't done a great deal and crick was a physicist he didn't know very much about biology and watson didn't know very much about molecules and officially at least they never really collaborated on dna but informally unofficially they argue with each other and in a really rather dramatic way uh did solve what i think one must call the problem of the century jim was certainly our first american visitor when i got home that evening my wife said to me you know max was round with a rather strange young american geneticist and you know what she said he had no hair that's because he had a crew cut in those days and uh as soon as we met we found uh that although we had very different backgrounds we had a lot of things in common neither of us were trained for what really interested us now we both wanted to find the gene we weren't organic chemists we weren't anything else we just wanted to do the best we wanted to do the most sensible thing i've been self-taught i was stuck in cambridge there weren't that number of people who i could communicate with so that when i met you it was you were the first person in the outside world what is it in living cells that carries the genetic information from generation to generation what specifies how an organism grows at one level chromosomes are the answer and within the chromosomes the genes but how does a gene work and what is it made of by the end of the 1940s it was becoming clear that dna was the most likely candidate professor john randall had set up a group at king's college london to investigate the processes in living cells in randall's king's college group maurice wilkins was working on dna i was a physicist who'd worked during the war on on the atom bomb and uh i was rather disgusted by the way in which science had been misapplied and so i want to get out of physics and i thought there were bigger potentiality for uh using science in a sort of beneficial way in biology wilkins work on genetic material took him on a visit to naples early in 1951 while there he gave a talk on dna in the audience was jim watson and then i suddenly became aware there existed someone who actually was trying to solve the structure of dna which seemed to be the likely candidate for the gene but morris was serious and deadly serious and i tried to talk to him but morris i feel you know he's english and doesn't talk much to strangers and so i left and sort of vague feeling that would be nice if i could work with morris but it wasn't it wasn't a sort of obvious coming together of like minds jim watson realized that england was the ideal place to pursue his dna interest by a lucky accident he managed to obtain a place at cambridge there the medical research council had an ambitious program of research on biological molecules my first couple months in cambridge were terribly chaotic when i went up i went to the digs and max had helped get me on park place and dismal place where the landlady wanted me to take off my shoes when i came in at night and didn't want me to flush the toilet after 10 in the evening and after a rather short while i wasn't very sympathetic and she threw me out but i think the main thing was that none of these things bothered me because i met francis and it was a tremendous change before that i had been with lots of bright people which was very useful and i couldn't agree with any of them i guess both of us at that time our thoughts were somewhat dominated by linus pauling might have been dominated for a long while because he was sort of the symbol of caltech greatness and he was the great chemist who was going to solve biology and uh had you met lymeless by this time he smiled he smiled at you once i remember it very clearly because we were uh walking in the the washroom of the athenian the sort of faculty club of caltech and linus looks down at me and smiles at me and i think a strange place for this to happen linus pauling then professor of chemistry at the california institute of technology is one of the most eminent chemists of this century he was awarded the nobel prize for his work on the chemical bond he came to public notice recently through his suggestion that vitamin c could fend off the common cold in the late 1940s brilliant insight enabled pauling to work out an important element in the structure of proteins the so-called alpha helix one day when i was eastman professor at oxford in the spring of 1948 to april 1948 i caught a cold it was before the vitamin c days i caught a cold and after a day or two in bed reading science fiction and detective stories i got tired of that and i thought why don't i discover the alpha helix or thought something like that i took a piece of paper much like this piece and i drew on it to a representation of an extended polypeptide chain with the distances approximately right and the angles right except that one angle does not have did not have the right to value i still have that original piece of paper by the way this is the bond angle at the alpha carbon atom that didn't have the right value so i folded the paper actually it took several trials i folded it along several parallel lines through the successive alpha carbon atoms and finally i found a way by folding the paper i can make this bond angle have the value 110 degrees and i finally found a way of folding such that a hydrogen bond which held the helical structure together and had just the right dimensions it was the combination of deep chemical insight and brilliant inspiration that made linus pauling a potential threat would he now solve dna in the same manner of course linus pauling was a genius at this sort of thing he was capable of taking shortcuts he knew how to take a small part of the data use the rules of model building erect some general theoretical postulate and from out of that would become one or small number of models which would fit the data and what we decided really was that we'd try and use the same sort of method that he used on the alpha helix in trying to solve the structure of dna watson and crick hoped that by working out the molecular structure of dna deoxyribonucleic acid they'd get the insight as to how the hereditary mechanism is stored and duplicated in living cells and they decided that the linus pauling method was the right one for them they wanted to do it by thought and not by a lot of laborious experiment and that perhaps is rather the key to it because that was their style how did they set about it well the chemists had already shown that dna was made up of a lot of subunits the subunits consisted of sugars and phosphates and bases and it was known that there were four sorts of bases there was adenine there was thymine cytosine guanine and all these were put together in what were very long molecules it was known that there were hundreds of subunits in these dna molecules so that there undoubtedly were millions of possible combinations and one needed to know which was the right one well now how could they exclude all the irrelevant and the impossible combinations and for that one needed some hard experimental data on dna uh and the only place where that was coming from at the time was the group at king's college london raymond gosling was a phd student at king's college in professor randall's team uh professor randle was using the electron microscope to look for the genetic structure in ram sperm and as a junior research student at the time i was given the job of persuading a whole heap of brand sperm to lie down in an orderly fashion and try and get an x-ray diffraction photograph of them not getting a very clear picture i went to morris wilkins who was looking at extracted dna and had find that you could pull it into fibers so that i use these fibers to make a specimen to give me a dna pattern that i could compare with the ram sperm pattern of course pulling fibers isn't quite as easy as it sounds you take some of the pure material and put a little on the microscope slide add just enough water to make the gel and then you can use a glass fiber stuck on the side of the microscope with a piece of plasticine which you lower into the gel and you need the lamp on the side to see the fibers which when they come are very very tiny indeed and here we go persuade some of it to stick to the end of the rod like this and then gently raise it up out of the jelly until you get a column like that from which the fiber will run if you're lucky ah so back to square one it seems rather more difficult after 20 years than i in fact remembered this is the original camera that we took the first dna specimens on in this lab and we had a fairly weak x-ray beam so that we needed lots of material in the beam to get a diffraction cap and you see there a specimen made with 30 to 40 fibers of dna wrapped around this little metal jig there and we placed that in front of the x-ray set and after about a day we had a diffraction pattern what we realized we wanted was a much more intense beam that would let us look at single dna fibers this is the camera that we use to take photographs of single fibers you can see it's a very simple affair the single fiber is placed straight across the hole there defining the small beam of x-rays the film is in the back of the camera in this half they simply go together like that and you mount the camera in front of this x-ray set which had just been developed at the time and it was really the coming together of these three things being able to have a single strand a camera which would look at that strand with a very fine very intense beam of x-rays that previously hadn't been available and that enabled us to get diffraction photographs from a small crystalline region within one single fiber deciding what these pictures said about dna's structure needed specialist know-how rosalind franklin brought this expertise to the king's college group i first met rather than franklin late 1953 at birkbeck college where we both came to work on problems of virus structure i was perhaps her closest and certainly her last scientific colleague until her death four years later and got to know pretty well she would sometimes talk about dna and was very clear she'd been engaged by randall to put some teeth into the dna effort at kings when she came first to the lab wilkins was in america and the interview took place in professor randall's office between alex stokes myself meeting rosalind for the first time and i can remember my my own feelings at that interview it was very clear that as a research student i was being formally passed from one to the other and that not only was she being given the problem she was being given an assistant to work with her on the problem within a short time of her arrival at kings although she had known nothing about dna beforehand she uh rather transformed the problem and from the kind of murky pictures they had before she got excellent clear pictures which could be used for quantitative analysis scientifically the king's college work was going well but personal relationships between rosalind franklin and maurice wilkins had become rather strained well of course roslyn franklin was a professional crystallographer she'd done crystallography before and i think she always regarded morris as being less so and i think this was part of the the trouble between them rosney wanted to take over the problem and do it all herself and um while didn't see herself as collaborating with morris but there was always this tension between the two it was the days before a woman's live but she felt it was long do and women were badly discriminated against i think at king's college and uh i think morris uh when he brought roslyn in uh sort of afterwards regretted he'd given away his problem that is he thought he needed help brought in someone who's a trained crystallographer and then discovered that it wasn't his problem anymore i was a sort of general physical molecular biologist and i hadn't at all specialized in x-ray diffraction methods and so rosalind franklin was brought into this work uh because she was an experienced very able uh x-ray diffraction sort of specialist professional and uh looking back on it of course it's quite clear that if you regard sort of getting the structure of dna as a race that we'd lost the race very early on because we didn't find it possible to work together morris was and still is i think a reserved person rosslyn i don't think was so reserved she was shy so that she was intense morris wilkins was rather withdrawn and so they were really just about as different as you could get but how did you get on with roslyn terrible you make out jim you're sort of some male chauvinist pig but i think the real thing was it wasn't that it was the fact that she didn't think you knew much crystallography to which he was totally correct rosalind was rather prepared to discount them as being very serious competitors i think there was a general impression in the scientific community at that time that they were like butterflies they are flipping around with lots of lots of brilliance but not much solidity and obviously in retrospect this was a ghastly misjudgment by now rosalind franklin's pictures were good enough to analyze and she presented her results at a meeting which jim watson attended it was in kings which was next to somerset house it was a very old sort of place and it was almost dick in the slack and uh not many people really cared about what roslyn said it was a small audience and uh i didn't well i made this terrible mistake because well you're only a newborn crystallography how are you tonight the difference between the unit 7 the asymmetric unit but anyways i got the water wrong by a factor of 24 or something what what jim essentially reported was that in the way in the terms he uses was that it was a dry structure actually the facts were was extremely wet but this was due to the misunderstanding of two technical terms so we had an abortive attempt trying to solve the structure as if it were dry and we even got so far when we got back to cambridge to build models and i got very excited do you remember all that jim i was very excited probably because francis was excited it was our first dna model it wasn't very pretty but it was our first model so i guess we're pleased with it it did look like a sort of cylinder of things didn't it just tell them with things sticking out roughly speaking so we called up people with kings and said we solved it and would they like to see the answer and they came up because scared to death that we might have because they've been working on it and probably also skeptical that you couldn't have really guessed it without seeing the pictures but anyways the really especially roslyn because she was sort of a trained crystallographer knew how she thought you should solve it in a semi-logical fashion and uh here we were disobeying all the rules we didn't care much about the evidence we were going to sort of try and build a pretty structure and one which obeyed chemical rules and she didn't really think it was going to work but when she got up and we started explaining things she immediately asked you know where was the water and i said that there wasn't any you said that of course she said i didn't say that and i felt rather stupid and uh we all felt rise to you i think the housing was a complete flop and they were stumped back to london and got confident that we made assets ourselves of course the cambridge model really was an embarrassment to us to see these highly intelligent um cambridge chaps turning up with something which was obviously so crazily wrong it's uh i mean the whole thing was inside out i mean it's intuitively seen to us quite wrong that the phosphate said to be in the inside like that and the bases were on the outside and what the hell were they doing there but it had the effect that uh it was sort of a crying wolf and uh whereas up to then you know if we'd ask them some data they would have said uh sure this is what it is because they didn't think we were that interested now they knew we were deadly interested in in what they sort of had a long-range program maybe it'd take you another five ten years uh and we'll come up with the answer the fiasco over the model with the king's college group irritated sir lawrence bragg who was the head of the cavendish laboratory and as a matter of fact crick didn't always endear himself to brag i remember bragg once saying to me that crick's extremely penetrating voice made his head bars at 10 rate this last trouble wasn't the only one because some months earlier there'd been a problem over scientific priority as far as i could tell francis had just told the professor he'd stolen his ideas and of course when you tell your professor you're a thief someone has to give either you or the professor well you always had an exaggerated view of that jim the the plain fact of the matter was that i'd had a an idea of a of the crystallographic sort of idea and i discussed it with perez and kendra and as it turned out i'd even given it to the small cloak in which bragg was present but you know uh lots of ideas are mentioned you don't always take it up and actually what had happened was braggart had it independently but when bragg said isn't a nice idea and so on so forth i was you know young and naive and i couldn't resist saying yes it's it's very good but it's of course exactly what i was saying six months ago and nobody likes to be told that and he told me afterwards he didn't want to go to the tea room because he'd have to hear francis's voice which just meant that you know remind him of this thing and maybe he actually did pinch the idea you know it's very difficult because uh you know you hear someone's idea and maybe you you don't listen to him and he says something and then afterwards you think about it and god you know you've discovered independently and someone calls you a thief and so the border line between stealing someone else's idea and arriving at it independently is not always as clean cut as you think and since your memory is often you know it's hard to do it anyways it was a sort of tricky situation because i think from that moment on break had well you know a lot of ambitions chiefs they'd understand proteins but one of his minor ambitions certainly was that francis should leave the lab bragg wanted crick to stop talking so much and get on with his phd thesis and so he actually ordered francis to stop working on dna well now bragg and randall were two very powerful important figures and you might say that they rarely carved up the territory between themselves because bragg's lab at cambridge it was agreed would work on proteins and randall's lab in london it was agreed would work on dna so that francis by keeping on working on dna was in braggsville rocking the boat and protocol in those days and maybe even today as a matter of fact is really rather important so that you know dna was randall's territory and not bragg's but of course those sort of restraints didn't apply to linus pauling in fact linus uh wrote a letter or someone surprised me who said he was going to come to europe and hoped he could talk to me about francis and my work on dna pauling really was interested in everything sort of someday he was going to hit on dna and we kept telling morris yes we kept trying to frighten him just like the the mothers in the time of napoleon used to try and send their children to sleep by saying if you don't come to sleep boney will come we used to say tomorrow if you don't solve the structure you know lioness pauling will solve it you see didn't move morris he wanted to put the sound way and not be bullied by us morris had told us that linus in fact had asked them for their data that is to look at their x-ray photographs and i think by morris thought well i don't want to send linus our data until we've had enough time ourselves to look at it i wrote to wilkins at king's college asking if i could have prints of the photographs that he had obtained but i my effort was not successful so that i continued to work on the basis of these poor poorer photographs and of course this this was in part responsible for my failure to find the structure well it's really a matter of etiquette in these things so there is a convention which i think is very right in science that when you've done a lot of work and got some experimental data you have that should have the first chance of interpreting it you're not supposed to sit on it for years because the whole essence of science is communication but if you've done the work you should have the first go so i think was quite reasonable for morris not to give out his data before he'd done it at the time linus pauling wanted to come to england the mccarthy purges were at their height in america because of pauling's pacifist sympathies his passport was withdrawn some news of linus's scientific progress reached the cavendish through letters to his son peter my father wrote me a letter saying that he had uh had an idea for the structure of dna and we're going to publish it in the proceedings of the national academy of sciences which my father being a member he didn't have to have it refereed they'd publish it automatically he asked me whether i wanted a manuscript copy of it this was something that would be published within a month but did i want it sooner so i wrote back and said yes please and it came of course we're upset and the question was could it be right and we knew that linus didn't have a good x-ray photograph so could he have thought it through without any of the king's data as i recall jim peter didn't know at the time what the structure was he just knew that there was a structure so we were really on tenterhooks now in those days i had no idea what a gene was no idea what dna was uh in fact as i remember i had no idea what anything was and this paper came and i didn't know what any of this meant so i gave it to these two men one on my right hand side jim watson and one on my left hand side francis crick who seemed to have some idea they seemed to be interested peter came in with a big grin on his face and said he had his father's manuscript or even his magic princess actually about tore it from him to read what it was and quickly went through it it certainly wasn't confidential information this was just a preprint manuscript so i gave it to them and they looked at it and they seemed to understand it according to jim not only did i not know what nucleic acids were but my father didn't know either in fact he decided that dna was a deoxyribonucleic acid wasn't in effect an acid it wasn't charged it was using these hydrogen atoms sort of to form hydrogen bonds and it was a three stranded structure and we just couldn't believe it so the question was why did he do this why did he say that a nucleic acid wasn't an acid we didn't know and i rushed around cambridge showing it to people asking could he be right and they all said no it's an acid and as the afternoon wore on i was you know feeling a great relief that we still had a chance that the problem hadn't been solved by uh lioness we was born in the great release gym we were hilarious i'm sorry to say the thing we must have embarrassed poor peter because it wasn't absolutely i would say transparent it was wrong but we at least formed the opinion it was highly probable my father did the structure of mica and sodalite and a lot of other things and to him dna was just another chemical well it's nice using this particular method actually the stochastic method of of trying to determine the truth by conjecture in other words guessing you get so excited and interested that it's nice to get the right answer out and it's also nice to get the right answer out first but it's more important to get the right answer rather than be first now in his case he got the wrong answer well of course linus pauling really had terribly bad luck he had poor x-ray pictures but even worse than that they were misleading they were really two x-ray pictures on top of one another so the data that he used to get produce his structure didn't correspond to anything at all it isn't too surprising he got it wrong now at kings they had much better x-ray pictures an x-ray picture is not a simple picture like a photograph and to understand what you expect from a helix you have to work out a mathematical theory which shows you what the diffraction pattern would be and the mathematical theory of x-ray diffraction which was worked out for helix by several of us says that there will be a strong spot on the x-ray pattern in this direction here right angles of this line such as there on the pattern which has its center there and you can equally see that waves coming up this way here will also be strongly diffracted so you'll get that one up there and by symmetry one down there and one down there now it's also true that if you have shorter waves you get the same result you can have the waves going like this and so on and that will correspond to something in the same direction but a sort of second harmonic out like that and you may get the third harmonic it depends on the exact nature of the structure so what you'll get is a cross like that and the angle of the cross will depend on the angle of the helix and when jim went to kings with the erroneous structure of linus pauling in his pocket he was familiar with this x-ray diffraction theory morris read it and in his usual way didn't convey sort of enthusiasm one way or the other but i guess sort of said yes he didn't think linus was going to get the right structure at the same time however he sort of let loose the bombshell at least to me was that actually there were two types of dna x-ray photographs there was the form which i knew about called the a forum which gave this crystalline pattern but there was a second form called the b form and he opened the drawer and took out a photograph and boy i could hardly believe it it was a perfect it was a cross-like pattern and he told me that it repeated the 34 angstroms and that meant there was a helix in so i said morris you've got to build models of morrow yes he should build models but and trouble was with miss franklin but he thought the thing was coming under control and soon he would be able to build models but i tried to impress adam that really lioness wasn't going to wait someone at caltech was bound to tell linus that was wrong and uh so i thought also though i should go in and see uh roslyn and so i went in and told her here's a copy of the pog manuscript uh would you like to see it it was clear that she was sort of annoyed at my trying to tell her something about crystallography and she came toward me i thought she was going to hit me so i quickly got out at which point morris was coming around and she almost hit morris oh god who hit who i don't think anybody anybody actually some people may have thought someone was going to hit somebody but um there certainly weren't very friendly feelings rosalind was under some strain uh possibly she was going to be leaving kings in a few months time in any case she was working very hard on the analysis of the dna structures both forms and the way watson couldn't possibly know and i think she simply regarded him as an intruder by now braggart heard of linus pauling's attempts to work out the structure of dna and you have to remember that linus pauling had beaten the british scientist to it in working out the alpha helical structure of protein when albrecht wanted dna to be a british success so he agreed that jim watson could start working on dna again by now of course the chemists knew exactly the chemical content of dna it was realized that there must be some sort of helical structure but why wasn't the structure entirely obvious and why build models the easiest way to answer this is to look at a little bit of the molecule such as the one i have here and you can see that we already know quite a bit these balls represent atoms the rods represent the bonds between atoms and we know from the study of small molecules in crystals this distance for example to about one percent all the other distances we know all the angles so it is true that we do know the shape of that little bit that's a base and it's connected to a sugar but it's connected by a single bond the sugar is fairly rigid too but what isn't rigid is this bond here you can get free rotation about it and there are other places in the molecule where there's free rotation several along the backbone so there's a very large number of ways given the chemical formula that you can actually build a model i would do it maybe three hours a day i mean it was hard to get at it in the morning but because by the time you'd get in there was morning coffee and then go for lunch we'd have our walk and then i'd come back and build the motto and sort of francis was working on his thesis and i would look over my shoulder to try and see what what jim was doing i guess it's awfully hard to give up an idea of your own so i started putting the phosphates in the center maybe because it was sort of like a polling structure maybe if we wouldn't use ions we'd get somewhere but francis really wasn't comfortable with this and told me why don't i try putting the phosphates on the outside i can't really remember why you said that francis well it's because i think jim that you know you were obsessional about having them on the inside and you produced a lot of phony arguments as to why basic groups from protamines had to go in and in all collaboration it's very important when one person has an idea that the uh other person criticizes it and as it were the devil's advocate so just for the very reason that jim was keen on having the phosphates on the inside i thought he ought to try on the outside and i remember this conversation was happening in the the um my dining room of our house and i said to jim well why don't you try a model with the phosphates on the outside and jim said it would be too easy meaning of course that you could build too many of them and i said well if it's too easy why don't you do it francis may have been playing the devil's advocate in telling jim to try the phosphates on the outside but indeed there were very good reasons for doing so and rosalind had said so at a colloquium in november 51 which watson attended but he had not understood and therefore hadn't taken the news back to francis so i cut some things out of cardboard and sort of made the right shapes and then pasted things on which would indicate hydrogen atom then i think i went off and played tennis and it wasn't until the following morning i came in i started to put them together in pairs because this tie stage we decided well two a two chain structure is simpler than three chain and why shouldn't we try it well there were complicated technical reasons whether it was two or three but by that time the balance was strongly in favor of two i think so but but still it was easier to do and i always choose the easier so by now it was obvious that dna consisted of two strands wound helically around each other it was obvious that the phosphates were on the outside but where exactly were the bases and how did they fit together and it was francis who spotted the first vital clue in those days there was a brilliant young theoretical chemist in cambridge called john griffith he died quite recently and one evening we were sitting in a pub and talking about biological replication and i said to him perhaps the secret is that the bases attract each other in pairs but like would like adenine going with adenine stacked on top of each other like this and guanine going with guanine and so on and i said could he work out work it out to see if calculations would support that he was good at that sort of thing i met him a little later in the tq at the cavendish and he told me he'd done a few scribbles on the back of an envelope and he'd found that not like would like but that adenine stacked nicely on top of thymine and guanine on top of cytosine he'd been thinking along those lines at the time that i didn't know that so i said jim well that's all right that's perfect that's all we need for a replication scheme the relative amount of the four bases in dna had been worked out by a nucleic acid chemist called owen chagaf a few years before this time and it happened he was passing through cambridge and we were chatting to him in john kendra's rooms in peter house and we asked him what had come of all this nucleic acid work and he told us about his results which were that the amount of adenine equal the amount of thymine and the amount of guanine equal the amount of cytosine in all sorts of dna wherever he looked although the ra other ratios were all over the place well the effect on me was electric because i saw immediately that this is what you'd expect from a scheme like john griffice's so i was very excited i didn't mention it to charge at the time because it was work i was doing with john griffis but when we checked it all out we could see the two fitted together and looking back on it i find it extremely surprising that nobody else pointed this out because anybody who knows about the history of science knows that when you have one-to-one ratios it means that things go together i knew chargeff and was aware of his uh analyses one-to-one ratios and the whole thing is in retrospect it's easy enough to see that one-to-one ratios uh suggested that things were connected in pairs but but at the time it was very different the idea of deducing structural characteristics from analytical data is really quite a big and in some cases unjustifiable leap and but in my case it uh the the penny dropped on this one really very late and too late in relation to any of our model building the second clue came when watson started playing with cardboard models of the bases he knew that adenine should go with thymine and that guanine should go with cytosine but exactly how in march 1953 watson suddenly saw that when a went with t in this way it formed the same shape pair as when c went together with g this was the second crucial inside now the pairs of bases could fit easily inside the two helical backbones and suddenly i could put together a and t and g and c could hardly believe it and francis came in almost immediately and saw this and he you remember something came out of the model building that jim had done which he hadn't put in and that's always the sign that you feel you're on the right lines when something begins to click which you hadn't actually put in in your thinking of the subject which you knew was there but even more important francis by using these rules a and t and g and c we understood how the molecule replicated everything from then on was clear everything was finished except the hard work that's to say producing an accurate model jim wasn't much good at that sort of thing the models tended to flop about in his hands so he left it to me we didn't work with a great big model we worked with a small piece just a sugar a phosphate and half a base pair and i had to get it so that the bond distances and angles were reasonable he joined on to the next one and it was at the right sort of radius and so on sometimes the time jim would come rather nervously up and see what i was doing hoping that everything was all right we were in a funny situation psychologically we could we knew we were home but we weren't quite certain we were in it's as if we could see the port in the distance but we still had to navigate our way into the harbor it was a lot of hard work i worked continuously for about four days and uh then came the point where we saw that everything fitted and i was so tired i went straight home and went to bed the pairs of bases lay flat across the molecule suspended between the two backgrounds here was the key to replication as the backbones unwind the pairs of bases split apart each separated base has to be complemented by its partner base a with t and c with g each unwan chain was a template for two identical copies this is how the genetic material is copied as cells divide into two into four and so on all the time we were working on the structure i didn't think i worried too much about what the structure might tell us i just thought we ought to find out that when we had found out of course it struck us with a tremendous impact just how beautiful and exciting it was because there before us was the answer to one of the fundamental problems in biology how do genes replicate and it was very simple and you couldn't miss it we used occasionally just jim and i just sit and look at the molecule and think how beautiful it was and i remember an occasion when jane jim gave a talk to a little biophysics club we had it's true they gave him one or two drinks before dinner he was rather a short talk because all he could say at the end was well you see he's so pretty he's so pretty [Music] people said we were terribly clever for thinking of this idea of replication i mean we had to be sort of a five-year-old not to see it wasn't clever at all it was sort of a bonus which you could say made it's terribly famous we had nothing to do with it at all it was the molecule itself which did it undoubtedly it was a major turning point but of course the watson creek breakthrough was a said many times a little sort of pinnacle built on an immense wide basis of chemistry by chemistry and genetics and so on essential work which people like todd and um chargaff and many others um had to work through before and was able to put that little thing the three-dimensional structure of dna on top in jim's mind pauline was a great rival but in his rather perfunctory context with rosalind he hadn't got the measure of her at all indeed he didn't know that she was only one or two steps away from the solution and she showed in a very short while that there were two helices the double helix of phosphate sugar chains and she was trying to fit in the bases looking back on it all it's very clear that one of her difficulties was that she didn't have a collaborator with whom she could discuss problems very very closely and she was one person against this very very powerful combination of two extraordinary people i think this is the most important discovery in the field of biology that has been made in the last 100 years we owe a great deal to watson and crick for having made this discovery when the thing had come out of course we were tremendously excited about it we wanted to tell it to everybody every time a visitor came they would get this account of how this model explained so easily and beautifully the replication until jim got so sick of my explaining to people he just went out of the room every time i brought a visitor in but there again we didn't realize i think how widely it was going to spread i remember going home and telling odile that you know we made what looked like an important discovery and she told me after i didn't leave a word of it that i was always saying that they didn't always turn out and so it only came rather more gradually and as for having anything about prizes and so forth although the impression i got from jim is that he realized at the time it wasn't until a year or two later in america actually frank putnam said something to me about a prize and it suddenly struck me for the first time this is the sort of work which you give a prize for because uh to get a nobel prize it has to have a certain character and i was astonished to notice that this piece of work had exactly that character now what was the secret of qriken watson's success it was i think a unique collaboration between two people of entirely different backgrounds very different personalities uh different scientific abilities and yet sharing an identical very deep curiosity about the fundamental processes of life the dna story is without doubt one of the greatest success stories in the history of science but i'm not sure it's an altogether typical one of the way science is done because it can't be often that two comparative newcomers to a field make such a major discovery so quickly francis do you think we were lucky to have solved it or was it real brain work well i guess we were certainly lucky and of course you give the impression your book jim we didn't really do too much thinking but uh we were lucky i think for two reasons we we were thinking about the problem at the right time and then the two of us by collaborating when one of us got on the wrong track the other one could get us out of it when if if i thought there were three chains at one stage you were sure there were two if you thought that the phosphates had to be in the middle then i would be the devil's advocates and say put them on the outside and i think this is very important in solving structures of this kind because the difficulty is that you've got to give several logical steps one after the other if you get go wrong you get one person gets too fond of their own ideas i think another thing that which helped us in our collaboration was we weren't at least afraid of being very candid to each other at the point of being rude and if you don't have constant interchange and chatting together and saying what you think of the other people's ideas to their face i don't you can solve problems of this kind i've often had a thought with that in a slightly different way that if either of us you know we're either two years older or two years younger at least in my case i would have never solved it yes we had to be there just at that particular time we sort of pulled the way we looked at things we didn't leave it the gym did the biology and i did the physics we both did it together and switched roles and criticized each other and this gave us a great advantage over the other other people who are trying to solve it not [Music]

The Oracle at Delphi

The Oracle at Delphi

"Let's try tonight to to build up to an understanding of uh Diocletian and his so-called reforms -- and why these were bad; and why you don't want to you don't want to try them again....!

You don't want to go down that road another time, and --

And where all of this stuff uh came from --

And I suppose, where we start is the um -- The Cult of Apollo at Delphi as the.... the, um -- you could call it an organ of World Government, as a matter of fact : 

The more you look into it, the more it does appear as functioning in many ways uh -- similar to The United Nations Security Council and The General Assembly of our own time..... yeah you do! 

And some of these personalities also seem to come back -- we'll get after Butros Butros a little bit later on....! 

The Delphic Apollo : There were probably half a dozen different oracles that the greek world knew, but this was the dominant one -- 

And it had this funny position of being in The Centre of The Greek World in terms of geographical location -- 

The Legend is, that Zeus wanted to find The Center of The World so he released An Eagle from each extremity of the universe and these flew on a line and met and that was Delphi, so -- it's this rocky craggy place where this strange temple is located. 

Now, the Apollo that is worshiped there is, of course, The Oligarchical Deity par excellence and many things flow together into the into the shape of Apollo --

In many ways, Apollo is Marduk -- Marduk being this.... sinister oligarchical god of the interior of Asia-Minor, of Turkey; but then of course, there's also, in Apollo this overtone of Isis and Osiris; and that Apollo with this pythoness, this woman, The Pythia, we'll see, who -- she reminds you somewhat of Isis and Osiris; and of course, the fact that Osiris was castrated -- big important aspect in the whole thing -- and then brought back from the dead by Isis. 

The way that the temple was set up was, that you had this priestess, The Pythia, The Pythoness, who was uh -- whether she was young as she was at certain points, by tradition, or sometimes only older women were allowed to do this function : she would uh start off by being a relatively illiterate country woman who knew really very little of what she was doing but she would mount a seat which was placed on a tripod over a kind of cleft in the ground, it was something you obviously you wouldn't want to fall into --

But she was sit on this thing, and after having eaten certain kinds of ceremonial foods — burned barley corns and other kind of stuff, she would begin to babble ---

And she would just babble -- and she would go into transports of apollonian ecstasy (whatever) and just talk, like speaking in tongues, I guess, if you've if you've heard any of that stuff going on -- 

Now, how did anybody make sense out of this....? 

Well, there was A Priesthood, that was attached to The Temple of Apollo, and these were the oligarchical families of Delphi, which was a small state it was a -- well it was A City-State, I guess, to some extent but small, not populous not powerful not anything special in itself.

But somehow these people represented a cross-section of Greek Oligarchical Opinion and more important were connected to these Babylonian Magi, and the people who were operative in The Persian Empire to The East, so uh -- 

The Way it Would Work, then, is that you would come as a representative of Athens or of Corinth or whatever you were, you would bring gifts — put down money; and you were then allowed to Question The Pythoness, who would then go into one of these transports and she'd rattle off a whole bunch of babbling, and then the priests would come up, and they would explain what it was that she had said; which had of course to come out in greek hexameters of a certain literary quality.

Now that -- that makes these guys 

the original Spin-Doctors — 

They put The Spin; there was — 

Something Happened and they 

tell you what it was — right? 

“What did all that mean?”

and in Greek hexameters.

Now, uh — the prestige of this oracle was was immense, it was a — it was obviously A Bank, there were these deposits of treasure gifts that were made; the wealth of this place was was a legend in antiquity, and it was also therefore A Treasury : it looks like various cities actually kept part of their funds there, the kind of A Central Bank for The Greek States —  obviously with The Priests, with cults and then of course — the fact that, since everybody came there on these missions The Priests learn the knack of pumping everybody for information.

So, as many authors say : this was 

The Biggest Intelligence Bureau in The World. 

They would uh sometimes formulate answers…. for example one guy, he said, “Look, should I invade my neighbouring country….?” and The Answer was, “….if you carry out the invasion you will destroy a great kingdom.” 

…..of course it turned out that it was his own kingdom that was destroyed — this was King Croesus.

But there are, I think, important tendencies in the way that The Delphic oracle operated that are that are worth pointing out : The main thing is that it was An Organ of The Oligarchy, and that this can be proven by the political choices that it made, and it made these things repeatedly.

First of all, the main favouritism of The Delphic Oracle was for Sparta and why is this important? Well, as Schiller pointed out in the famous lecture on on History : the principal tendencies that come back in western civilisation are, the tendency of Lycurgus of Sparta : the oligarchical imperialist militaristic one, and Solon of Athens, the city builder on the other side —

Well, it is legendary that Lycurgus’ constitution of Sparta was either dictated — as I think is likely — dictated by the priests of Apollo at Delphi, or at the very least, approved by them that was like Lycurgus brought it to the oracle and saying don't you think that the lack of demonians ought to be governed by these laws and then of course the python earthquake and the priest said yes you win like kyrgyz so that is the version that we find in Xenophon that ly kyrgyz went to the oracle and got the uh version the constitution for sparta approved thank you joey we're just we're just going through some stuff on the delphic uh oracle great over there yeah over there would be fine but not not on that yeah good thank you now um you can also see in cases of war the delphic oracle would sometimes declare that it was supporting one side or the other uh for example in the case of the peloponnesian war a little bit before 400 right this general war of the greek states uh the delta apollo made a an unsolicited declaration that they were supporting they were supporting sparta not only were they supporting sparta but they were not going to wait to be asked they were going to support them and go down the line with them no matter what they did which is rather revealing i guess you'd say now the other the other way that the delphic apollo expressed its pro-oligarchical tendencies is its support for the persian empire because of course greek history in this time is this endless war century upon century of trying to stand up against the constant encroachment of the persian empire which they basically succeeded in holding off and ultimately uh conquered even though the greeks by that time will weaken themselves it is uh the attack of uh the persian emperor xerxes which concerns us here :

This is reported in Thucydides — The Athenians sent a delegation of two representatives to the Delphic Apollo, basically saying well “Xerxes is… is attacking us, he's approaching — what should we do?” 

And uh this is a this is a remarkable opinion that was then tendered by the Delphic Apollo; 

The Delphic Apollo basically said uh — you wretched men what are you sitting here for?

fly to the ends of the earth and leave your homes 

in the topmost heights of your wheel-shaped city 

the fierce the fire and fierce ares driving his syrian car 

will destroy your city and he will lay low 

many other fenced cities and not yours alone —

so after some more verbiage like this depart from my sanctuary with your souls steeped in sorrow this was the advice that the Delphic oracle gave athens at the moment that Xerxes was on the march now the two athenians said we can't go back with that we can't you know that's defeatist that's going to ruin everything right no but nobody's going to fight if they've heard that opinion from the norfolk apollo so what they did they they knew that there was a trick you could pull with the darpa kapala you could get a second opinion and the way you did that was you had to come in as a suppliant not just as a client with gifts but you had to come expressing a great deal of uh subordination to this thing and you had to pick up what they called supplicatory branches in other words you had to some come in with these bowels of laurel or myrtle or whatever it was and therefore can't you give us a second opinion right can't we have a better response for the country and the pithia at this point says, “Well —

don't quietly await the cavalry and infantry 

that in a mighty host of advancing from the mainland 

but turn your back and withdraw —

you should live to fight another day —

and uh mentions a few things about uh maybe ships or the ocean or something like this um they then this was this was also her basically saying run for your lives although in a slightly less purple rhetoric they went back these two athenians to their uh general themistocles and he was forced then to put his own spin on this basically saying well indeed why don't we try fighting in the water instead of on land and this is then the battle of salamis which the greeks won against the persians but no thanks to the to the toxic oracle right which was basically saying run for your lodge and then when the greeks the the athenians tried to give supplementary presence to the delphic oracle as a result of the victory say well you know thanks to your prophecies we did prevail the delphic oracles is apparently the only time this ever happened said no we can't take those presents from you athenians so uh this obviously gave the gave the dolphin oracle a bad name now the other thing that the delphic oracle uh did was its support of rome and i think this this is the uh the thing that i wanted to look at just a little bit uh also this evening the delta oracle is basically anti-etruscan remember that in the italian peninsula at the time when you had rome starting off the most advanced civilizations were these etruscans in the north tuscany right florence whatever — Po plain, and then in the south from Naples, all the way south;  those were all Greeks right that was the so-called magna graica and remember that naples continued to speak greek all through the roman empire until it went away into the middle ages that was a Greek city and not not Italian nevertheless the delphic oracle supported Rome — and they did this with the same kind of public stress that you can see in the way that they supported Sparta or supported the Persian Empire against against Athens and the other greek uh cities during the course of uh early roman history —

You have to remember that The Romans were this backward uh uncouth brutal murderous bunch compared to most of their neighbours, they were inferior — but the uh Delphic Apollo supported them. 

For example whenever they got into these wars with the Etruscan cities, like you read this in um -- Titus Livius, right? Livy — the history of the roman republic there whenever there's a a a battle a war going on between say they they is a large and relatively rich Etruscan city just a little bit north of Rome that The Delphic Apollo was giving advice what to do how The Romans could could overturn -- and they did, at a later point the Delphic Apollo decided that they would give an unprecedented permanent endorsement of Rome --

And they did this by singling out a special black stone which was called the niger lapis -- very interesting thing, right -- niger lapis it just means black stone -- that's all it means the blackstone rangers way back then this was located in greece but it was the symbol of the magna mater it was the great mother sibel this was supposedly the dwelling place of the goddess Sibel 

So the deltic apollo put out an opinion that this black stone had to be moved and it had to be taken from greece and put in the roman forum and that's where it stayed and they there still is in the roman forum today if you go there there's a black stone that they claim is the is the one 

well that's true and i don't know uh during the during the so this was a this was a a permanent endorsement this is something that was never really done for anybody in quite that form now later on uh in the punic wars when rome was fighting with uh with Carthage right the great thing that decided who was going to dominate the central mediterranean during the days when hannibal crossed his uh elephants over the alps and was laying waste to all parts of italy the delphic apollo sent messages of encouragement to the senate and the people of rome saying hang on keep fighting don't give in you can defeat hannibal and ultimately did this is pretty much what happened but again with the help of the intelligence and the propaganda and the cults coming out of the delphic apollo the other thing that we have to just recall is that in these days after the death of alexander the great there were kingdoms that grew up as the result of the falling apart of alexander's empire right these are the so-called i guess they're sometimes called the epigones the epigony they're sometimes also called the digadoki the generals that —

And if you were a big general under alexander the great you had a pretty good chance of becoming king and founding a dynasty and the cases of that that are most interesting are the Ptolemaic dynasty in egypt; these were greeks basically who set up a a kingdom here in egypt and then the so-called cellucids the cellucids was another general and his gang who took over syria okay um the delphic apollo liked the talmaic dynasty supported them which is interesting we get it later on when you get to the cleopatra because that's of course what what she was now when the roman empire came along it's interesting to see which of the roman emperors or proto-emperors were most supportive of the Delphic apollo mark anthony during the time that he dominated the eastern part of the roman empire came forward as a protector of the delphi kapala saying i'm going to rebuild this place if it was burned down of course a number of times that i'm going to i'm going to fix it up again the other emperors who um were most in favor of the dolphin kapala were nero who uh went there and uh actually he he did some kind of an indian giving operation he gave them a hundred thousand sisters but then took away all their land something like this domitian uh nerva trajan hadrian and it's interesting that the there's a there's a definite pattern that the emperors that were most friendly to the delphic apollo were also the most ferocious in in persecuting the the early christians now later this guy plutarch right we don't want to forget him when the delphic apollo had been uh more or less incorporated into the roman system of things Plutarch, the guy who writes these these famous parallel lives right the lives of the noble greeks and romans was a member of the priesthood right he was he was somebody who operated as part of the priesthood of the of the Delphi Apollo the last attempt to revive this thing in its old glory was the emperor julian the apostate remember him remember because constantine became A Christian — so-called and made in the the official uh religion of the roman empire became aryan christianity with uh with constantine but julian the apostate said no this is no good let's get back to the good old pagan ways and he tried to build this significantly around the uh the uh temple of apollo at delphi now the point of this is that this is the essence of what is metastasising this this thing -- 

And again it's it appears as a Greek institution, but what it really represents is this of Whore of Babylon faction, it is the Babylonian magi — the people that pop up, for example around The Roman Court, right? The most famous example, I think you may remember, is the Emperor Tiberius, right? — The one who presided over the crucifixion — had a Babylonian adviser, by the name of Thrasyllus, right? Maybe people know the famous story about about how Tiberius met Thrasyllus as well —they're on this cliff of of Capri, right? The island of Capri, near Naples? And what — what Tiberius would do, is, he would test these different uh — soothsayers and if he didn't like what they told him, he'd have them thrown off the cliff —

So, he was -- Tiberius with with a bunch of centurions and guards and um, he went up to Thrasyllus, and he said “Let's see if this guy knows what's going on….” 

So he asked him a couple of questions, and then he said, “Well, what do you see in my future…?” 

And Thrasyllus looks into his crystal ball or his bird-entrails or whatever he had,  and he said “Wait a minute, I — my picture is completely blurred by the fact that my life is in extreme danger —” 

And Tiberius said, “THIS guy knows what's going on — let's get him!”

So that's — that's The Type of the of The Babylonian mages, and these — these are the people that were present in the, uh Roman Empire….

Now —”