If you’d like to find out, join me in watching Secret of Photo 51 on NOVA, airing at 8pm Teusday April 22nd (today), on your friendly local PBS station.
Finally, I won’t end up watching the show, forgeting half of the facts, forgeting whether it was Nature, or Nova, or some other series that I’ve lost track of, then attempting to put together some half-assed post about some interesting (to me) topic the next day.
I personally feel that exposure about Rosalind Franklin, her life, her work, and her academic/professional jilting…is long over due and valuable for the collective conscience to know.
Every scientist I’ve ever met - and I’ve met plenty - is fully aware of her contributions and her work and all that. But, hey, watch the show and enjoy it.
The thing is that the public mind is far less aware of the contributions of women than are professional scientists. Part of us it our own fault. We really don’t pay much attention to what the popularizers publish or ignore, except to complain about it in our coffee clatches.
The excellent 1987 BBC/A&E dramatization Life Story (starring Jeff Goldblum, Tim Pigott-Smith, and Juliet Stevenson) was very informative about Rosalind Franklin’s contribution to the discovery of DNA … it’s one of the best dramas about science that I’ve seen.
[anecdote] I sat next to a woman who claimed to be Rosalind Franklin on a transatlantic flight in 1990. She was very bitter about her lack of recognition and Nobel prize, and got drunk and even more bitter during the flight. It might, of course, not have been her at all, but an imposter/crazylady. She certainly was annoying. [/anecdote]
I don’t think it was her, since she died in 1958.
I thought that that was why she didn’t share the Nobel Prize, too; Waston and Crick got it in 1962 if my book here is correct; I can find a cite if you want. IIRC, they don’t award the Nobel Prize posthumously(that part I’m not sure about). If you want to know more about it, The Double Helix, Watson’s book about the whole thing, is fairly entertaining for a book about a couple of weird guys stealing data and playing with molecular model kits.
Ok…so my OP does imply that NOVA is busting out into uncharted territory, and we all know that isn’t the case. There have indeed been books published, movies made, documentaries documented…about Rosalind and her contributions. However, many people are not exposed to them outside of the science fields. It is this exposure, outside of the scientific community, on mainstream shows like NOVA, that I feel has been lacking, even with Jeff Goldblum.
The Nobel definitely isn’t awarded posthumously.
I think that much of the issue is that Watson and Crick pretty much stole her unpublished data, then didn’t give her any credit in their Science paper outlining the structure.
It aired on A&E under the title The Race for the Double Helix. Excellent show. Wish I had a tape of it. The excitement about searching for new science is exactly how I feel about my own research.
If someone can access it the New Yorker Magazine article on her a while ago is by far the most balanced and best treatment of the entire subject I have seen to date.
The bottom line of the NY article was that there were a lot of theoretical balls in the air at the time and that it was less perfidy by W&C (although they did really nail down the confirmation of the helix model with her x-ray films) and more her own focus on a different aspect of the DNA structure that would probably eventually have gotten her to the same place as W&C but taken longer. It could easily have been her or W&C or Pauling. W&C were like nosy ferrets and while Franklin and Pauling were focusing on their models, W&C were developing their own and synthesizing/swiping insights from others research as well to finalize their model. Their approach worked the fastest and won the race.
So the end justifies the means, hm? It was insultingly disrespectful of W&C not to acknowlege her contribution to their research, regardless of how productive W&C’s “approach” might have been. These were not children on the playground jockeying for a Hershey bar.
I read The Double Helix by James Watson a couple of years ago. I was repeatedly surprised by the disrespectful way in which he talks about Rosalind Franklin in the text, and then equally surprised in the last chapter (or possibly it was the epilogue) when he does a 180 and acknowledges her contributions and, IIRC, praises her groundbreaking work.
One obvious way in which Franklin was at a disadvantage is she was mostly working alone. Having another person to bounce ideas off of and to see another side of a question is a very valuable thing. Which leads to the question of why she was working alone? By choice, by exclusion due to discrimination, or because of a personality conflict?
As you read more about the history of science you will come to the understanding that contending for scientific discovery credit is very much like children on the playground jockeying for a Hershey bar.
Unfortunately, for some you might very well be right, but I argue that “contending for scientific discovery credit” is but one facet of Science. W&C pretty much shat upon a few other equally signifigant facets.
Placing too much emphasis on any one aspect of the Scientific model limits the capability of participating in “good science”.
Like what? W&C’s helix+base pairs model of DNA structure incorporated original aspects and insights that both Pauling and Franklin’s work did not. Rosalind Franklin’s line of investigation when W&C published was not focused in the right area for the correct answer which W&C deduced.
W&C may have been snoopy about the progress others had made and stingy at giving credit for some insights they got from other’s work, but in the end they were the first to publish a workable theory. They may have been assholes but they were not bad scientists.
