# What does Rosalind Franklin have to do with the discovery of DNA? **URL:** \ **Category:** Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share\ **Created:** [April 22, 2003, 4:23am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-does-rosalind-franklin-have-to-do-with-the-discovery-of-dna/170246 "2003-04-22T04:23:09Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 10\ **Page:** 2
**Author:** ![Icerigger](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/icerigger/32/432_2.png) [@Icerigger](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Icerigger)\ **Post date:** [April 22, 2003, 11:09pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-does-rosalind-franklin-have-to-do-with-the-discovery-of-dna/170246/21 "2003-04-22T23:09:13Z")
Did not something similar happen to **Jocelyn Bell** , the principal discoverer of the Pulsar, her male boss received the credit. ---
**Author:** ![ComeToTheDarkSideWeHaveCookies](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/e9bcb4/32.png) [@ComeToTheDarkSideWeHaveCookies](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ComeToTheDarkSideWeHaveCookies)\ **Post date:** [April 22, 2003, 11:18pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-does-rosalind-franklin-have-to-do-with-the-discovery-of-dna/170246/22 "2003-04-22T23:18:07Z")
Not every scientific advance occurs in such a talented arena as the discovery of the structure of DNA did. Not every field allows for the luxury of being able to use the data of another competent scientist if you just happen upon it, without attempting to reproduce that data yourself, and not have it come around to bite you in the ass because the “snooped” data was bad. Not every scientific advance occurs in such a publicized arena, with everyone in the scientific community being abuzz with the news. If you happen to be researching more obscure subject matter, and you are relying on previously published information for your work (I hear this happens from time to time in the scientific community) a paper that omits sources is not nearly as valuable (or credible) as one that cites the origin of the data. W&C’s position and environment allowed them to cut corners that much of the rest of the scientific community cannot (and arguably should not) cut. Being snoopy and stingy might _function_ for the elite who scramble for Hershey bars on the cutting edge, but such behavior degrades the functionality of the scientific community as a whole. ---
**Author:** ![ComeToTheDarkSideWeHaveCookies](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/e9bcb4/32.png) [@ComeToTheDarkSideWeHaveCookies](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ComeToTheDarkSideWeHaveCookies)\ **Post date:** [April 23, 2003, 12:58am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-does-rosalind-franklin-have-to-do-with-the-discovery-of-dna/170246/23 "2003-04-23T00:58:29Z")
Whew. I don’t even know where to start… I’m going to have to ruminate for a bit. ---
**Author:** ![Zoe](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/z/a4c791/32.png) [@Zoe](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Zoe)\ **Post date:** [April 23, 2003, 7:48am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-does-rosalind-franklin-have-to-do-with-the-discovery-of-dna/170246/24 "2003-04-23T07:48:06Z")
> [@](#): > > 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. But Rosalind Franklin was not on the playground. She was inside doing research and apparently was not aware that there was a brawl going on. The results of her research was devulged without her permission or even her knowledge. As you read more about the history of women you will come to the understanding that the “competition” was not on a level playing field (or _playground_ in your analogy.) James Watson behaved disgracefully and still has not set the record straight. She was isolated, ridiculed and ripped off. ---
**Author:** ![Becky](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/c4cdca/32.png) [@Becky](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Becky)\ **Post date:** [April 23, 2003, 11:27am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-does-rosalind-franklin-have-to-do-with-the-discovery-of-dna/170246/25 "2003-04-23T11:27:20Z")
Here’s an interesting tidbit from a SciAm interview with Watson: from [http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?chanID=sa006&articleID=00062AB0-2F4F-1E64-A98A809EC5880105](http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?chanID=sa006&articleID=00062AB0-2F4F-1E64-A98A809EC5880105) Quote: SA: Looking back on the race for the double helix, it’s obvious that individual personalities strongly influenced the specifics of who found it first and how. And yet the discovery at roughly that time also seems to have been inevitable. There were so many of you who were so close-you and Crick, Linus Pauling of the California Institute of Technology, Maurice Wilkins and Rosalind Franklin at King’s College. If you and Crick had not made the discovery when you did- JW: I can’t believe a year would have passed. We didn’t know that Rosalind Franklin had in late February turned in the B form because she was leaving King’s College. We didn’t know her then. I still didn’t know about it when I wrote The Double Helix (1968). SA: There has always been the controversy about Maurice Wilkins having shown you Rosalind Franklin’s crystallography images without her permission, and that having given you and Francis an important clue to DNA’s structure. JW: People have said, why didn’t you talk to Rosalind later and thank her for seeing the picture? She didn’t want to talk about it. She didn’t talk to coworkers about it. When she was dying, she stayed with Francis, and that might have been an occasion to reminisce about the past, but she was just “on with the future.” She’d missed that one; she wanted to get the next one. SA: In retrospect, would it have been more appropriate for the Nobel to have been given to her, along with you and Francis, rather than to Maurice Wilkins? JW: I think not. Wilkins gave us the crystalline photograph of the A form and she gave us the B form. So you could have said that in an ideal, perfect society, they would have gotten the chemistry prize and Crick and I would have gotten the biology prize. That would have been a nice way to honor the four of us. But no one thought that way. We’re very famous because DNA is very famous. If Rosalind had talked to Francis starting in 1951, shared her data with him, she would have solved that structure. And then she would have been the famous one. On that Saturday morning [February 28, 1953, when Watson and Crick conceived of the double helix] we were proposing a model which we weren’t sure was right. We had thought that x-ray data would then just be very decisive in making people believe it. Because [the model had suggested] a copying scheme that all the biologists wanted to believe in independently of the x-ray data. End quote. Interesting viewpoint, to say the least. ---
**Author:** ![ComeToTheDarkSideWeHaveCookies](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/e9bcb4/32.png) [@ComeToTheDarkSideWeHaveCookies](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ComeToTheDarkSideWeHaveCookies)\ **Post date:** [April 23, 2003, 3:55pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-does-rosalind-franklin-have-to-do-with-the-discovery-of-dna/170246/26 "2003-04-23T15:55:21Z")
I think the my views on the issue can be summarized with one example of W&C’s behavior. Crick does at least appear to have a conscience about the matter, as opposed to Watson, but I’m going to continue to refer to them together as it relates to my example. If the story as it is told by NOVA is correct in these details, W&C **used Franklin’s data to convince their superior to let them back in the lab**. Knowing this, the vague reference in W&C’s published work is an even more bitter pill to swallow. If it weren’t for Franklin’s data, they might have experienced who knows how many delays while they “networked” enough evidence to present the lab for funding/lab time. ---
**Author:** ![astro](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/9dc877/32.png) [@astro](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/astro)\ **Post date:** [April 23, 2003, 4:50pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-does-rosalind-franklin-have-to-do-with-the-discovery-of-dna/170246/27 "2003-04-23T16:50:46Z")
I would encourage you all to read the (long) New Yorker article/review of “Dark Lady” linked [here](http://www.newyorker.com/critics/books/?021028crbo_books). It will answer a lot of the questions this thread poses and put the entire issue in context and with a lot more more detail than the NOVA program. Here’s just a little bit of the article intro- [PHOTO FINISH by JIM HOLT Rosalind Franklin and the great DNA race. Issue of 2002-10-28](http://www.newyorker.com/critics/books/?021028crbo_books) > [@](#): > > [sub]The structure of DNA, the molecule of life, was discovered in the early months of 1953. Nine years later, three men were jointly awarded a Nobel Prize for this achievement, which has proved to be one of the most consequential in the history of science. James Watson and Francis Crick, who worked at the Cavendish Laboratory, in Cambridge, England, came up with the famous double-helix structure. The third man honored, Maurice Wilkins, was a scientist in London; although he worked at a rival lab, he did make available to Watson and Crick some of the experimental evidence that helped them clinch their discovery. The person actually responsible for this evidence, however, was not Wilkins but an estranged colleague of his named Rosalind Franklin, who had died four years before the prize was awarded. > > For a decade after her death, Rosalind Franklin remained little known beyond the world of molecular biology. Then, in 1968, Watson published “The Double Helix,” his rambunctious, best-selling account of the race to solve the structure of DNA. In its pages, Rosalind Franklin becomes Rosy, a bluestocking virago who hoards her data, stubbornly misses their import, and occasionally threatens Watson and others with physical violence—but who might not be “totally uninteresting” if she “took off her glasses and did something novel with her hair.” > > Friends and colleagues of hers mounted a counter-offensive, which was soon joined by feminist historians of science. Why did Watson create Rosy the Witch? Out of guilt for having used her evidence, which Wilkins showed him without her knowledge. Neither Watson nor Crick ever admitted to Franklin that they had relied crucially on her research; neither so much as mentioned her in his Nobel acceptance speech. Moreover, Franklin herself had made great progress toward identifying the structure of DNA. Had she not been the rare woman laboring in a patriarchal scientific establishment that limited her opportunities and stifled her talents, the triumph might well have been hers. So her partisans have contended. > > “Since Watson’s book, Rosalind Franklin has become a feminist icon, the Sylvia Plath of molecular biology, the woman whose gifts were sacrificed to the greater glory of the male,” Brenda Maddox writes in “Rosalind Franklin: The Dark Lady of DNA” (HarperCollins; $29.95). This mythologizing, Maddox thinks, has done Rosalind’s memory a disservice. One wouldn’t guess from the “doomed heroine” caricature, for instance, that Rosalind enjoyed an international reputation in three different fields of research. Nor would one guess from Watson’s depiction that, far from being frumpier than the average Englishwoman, she had actually brought with her to London elements of Christian Dior’s New Look that she had picked up during her years in Paris. Maddox, who has previously written lives of D. H. Lawrence and Nora Joyce, tells Rosalind’s story engagingly. We get a vivid picture of her scientific prowess, the complexity of her character, and the stoicism with which she pursued her research during her final months even as she was dying of ovarian cancer. Inevitably, though, it is her part in the DNA drama which commands the most interest. Did she really play an indispensable role in the great 1953 discovery, as Maddox finally joins so many others in suggesting? Was she cheated of the credit due her because she was a woman? [/sub] ---
**Author:** ![ComeToTheDarkSideWeHaveCookies](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/e9bcb4/32.png) [@ComeToTheDarkSideWeHaveCookies](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ComeToTheDarkSideWeHaveCookies)\ **Post date:** [April 23, 2003, 5:31pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-does-rosalind-franklin-have-to-do-with-the-discovery-of-dna/170246/28 "2003-04-23T17:31:59Z")
The following quote is from **astro’s** New Yorker review, critic Jim Holt: > [@](#): > > Had Rosalind been a man, the author suggests, she might have been encouraged to be more audacious. Yet a knack for guessing at an answer ahead of the evidence is one of the things that distinguish a great scientist from a good one, regardless of gender. Perhaps Rosalind was merely a very good scientist, not a great one. Not only does Holt flick his hand dismissively at the consequences of gender bias in this context, he goes on to use that flawed platform to propose that Franklin’s capabilities were what was lacking. I don’t believe anyone is advocating that women scientists be given special treatment when it comes to using intuition and creativity in scientific work. I frankly find this spin to be insulting. What people are advocating is the need for integrity and professional recognition to be factors in all levels of science. Integrity is a genderless attribute, much in the same way that Holt’s creative scientific intellect is a genderless attribute. ---
**Author:** ![ftg](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/ftg/32/2801_2.png) [@ftg](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ftg)\ **Post date:** [April 23, 2003, 6:52pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-does-rosalind-franklin-have-to-do-with-the-discovery-of-dna/170246/29 "2003-04-23T18:52:58Z")
The aforementioned “The Race for the Double Helix” presented the differences in style between W&C and RF thusly (and not, of course, necessarily correctly): RF was methodical. Do all the experiments first, then look at the results. W&C were creative. Pull out what bits of knowledge you could glean from anywhere, make some guesses, see if it fits. They got it wrong a time or two before getting it right. Sometimes slow and stready wins, sometimes it doesn’t. This time it didn’t. One thing that was significant in W&C’s choice of method was the sense they had that Pauling was about to crack it. Time was an important factor to them, not to RF. I believe that a variety of styles (many more than just these two) are great for Science. Use all the tools available. People’s personalities are tools. (Pardon me if I don’t make the obvious joke here.) I see nothing wrong in the least in “going for the gold” (and as rapidly as possible). As long as you are willing to accept responsibility for the failures possible in such a technique. Most do fail with this strategy. A few don’t. Hawkings is another example of this strategy. (He was also under time pressure, or so he thought.) Did RF lose a lot of limelight? You bet. Was what she had done on a par with W&C? Not at all. ---
**Author:** ![ComeToTheDarkSideWeHaveCookies](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/e9bcb4/32.png) [@ComeToTheDarkSideWeHaveCookies](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ComeToTheDarkSideWeHaveCookies)\ **Post date:** [April 23, 2003, 10:30pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-does-rosalind-franklin-have-to-do-with-the-discovery-of-dna/170246/30 "2003-04-23T22:30:36Z")
While playing “what if” is very tempting in this case, considering the environment found by women scientists at the time, and considering the implications of Franklin’s data on W&C’s data, it is not the most important point in this matter, at least not IMHO. This is an issue of hind-sight being 20/20, and an obligation to apply that vision with wisdom. This is an opportunity to set the record straight and teach a lesson to society and the scientists of today and tommorrow. I am not proposing that Franklin would have solved the riddle faster if only A) B) C) and D) had occured. There is room for those discussions, but there is not enough data to make anything but vague guesses. However, there **is** enough data to support the argument that W&C are responsible for what I consider to be an undeniable embarrassment to the Scientific community. Yes, W&C crossed the line first. They have their Nobel Prize and their fame and the lot. Yes their approach in regards to application and conceptualization of data is valuable and productive approach to have. I agree with **ftg** in that Science is best served by a diversity of approaches. Pretty much everyone involved in this discovery made wrong turns. W&C’s preliminary model, Franklin’s concentration on the dry form…wrong turns are a part of scientific deduction. Franklin provided criticism of W&C’s early model. Watson implied criticism of Franklin’s interpretation of data on mutliple occasions. But Franklin was professionally disrespected by W&C on many levels, and while Crick has acknowleged this, Watson has paid token attention to the idea, and has made a pretty penny with his book about the whole affair. As intuitive as his mind may be, it is the mind of a horse’s ass. Franklin’s short life was not phased by these events that we find so tumultuous today. She continued her work and made great advancements with the study of viruses and led the life that made her happy in spite of all of the forces working against her, and other women scientists of her day. What changes am I looking for? I think that the events that led up to the discovery of the structure of DNA should be presented _in their entirety_ in text books. There are many examples of what to do, and what not to do as a scientist, concealed within those events. The bigger picture is a much more informative and valuable lesson than the picture that the general public has been provided untill recent years. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-does-rosalind-franklin-have-to-do-with-the-discovery-of-dna/170246.md?page=1)