/Sadegh mirshamsi, CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
This year is the 70th Anniversary of the discovery of the structure of DNA and it is seeing a revision of the role of Rosalind Franklin who has, perhaps, been painted in the wrong, diminished, colours.
New biographies being prepared, by separate writers, of James Watson and Francis Crick, are throwing new light on the story of the woman often called the Dark Lady of DNA and discovering that her role was neither that of marginal collaborator nor victim.
Painting Dr Franklin in these shades is to diminish her influence and minimise the forces against which she worked. Saying that the late forties and fifties were different times, although that is relevant, doesn’t cut it as a full explanation.
It is years since I read James Watson’s book, ‘The Double Helix’, and think I most likely read it straight – as an account of what actually happened. In 1987, the BBC Horizon television production, ‘Life Story’, starring Jeff Goldblum as Watson and Tim Pigott-Smith as Crick, Alan Howard as Maurice Wilkins, and the luminous Juliet Stephenson as Franklin, told the story from the book – describing it as though it were wholly true.
What many people, including me at the time, did not realise was that Watson’s book was only partly true, a great deal of it was dramatized to make a good story, with the contributions of Franklin and Maurice Wilkins (of King’s College, London) marginalized in the process of glorifying Watson and Crick.
What the film did give credence to was the laddish nature of the Cavendish Laboratory, Cambridge, at the time, with the swashbuckling portrayal of Watson dramatically announcing that they had discovered the structure in The Eagle, a public house in Cambridge.
Science hardly ever progresses like that. It usually moves ahead by grinding, painstaking work, achieving little or no success for ages. Sometimes there is a breakthrough, but those which are announced are quite often much ado about nothing. They are romantic-sounding aberrations, but little else. The real work of science is in the day-to- day effort – and the exchange of data and ideas by scientists.
Collaboration – especially on an international level – is the lifeblood of scientific progress.
New reporting discusses the supposed victimization of Rosalind Franklin, with her not being included in the citation for the 1962 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, awarded to Watson and Crick, and Maurice Wilkins – because the Prize is not given posthumously, and Franklin died of ovarian cancer in 1958 at the age of 37, and the fact that Watson purloined Photograph 51 – which, allegedly sparked his idea that DNA must be helical – without Franklin’s knowledge, and inferring that she had not noticed that her photograph had revealed the key to the breakthrough.
Much of this is, of course, well known among scientists. There is even a joke about it:
“What did Watson and Crick discover in 1953?”
“Rosalind Franklin’s data!”
On reflection, it would have been beyond amazing for Franklin, a talented, brilliant, crystallographer, not to have recognised what she had, and Watson, who knew nothing about crystallography, to have understood it at a glance. There was, anyway, a notion around previously, that the beta form of DNA had to be a helix.
According to evidence from the new biographers, Nathaniel Cobb (Watson) and Matthew Comfort (Crick), Franklin independently realized how DNA’s structure could code for proteins in the cell. The biographers went back to the Franklin archive at Churchill College, Cambridge, and discovered materials which attest to Franklin being an equal contributor to solving the mystery.
In a paper in 1954, Watson and Crick acknowledged that their determining the structure of DNA “would have been most unlikely, if not impossible” without the data from Franklin, although their ‘breakthrough’ probably came from 6 weeks of gruelling work making cardboard models, by trial and error, as well as running endless calculations.
Why is thinking about this, and revising our opinions, if necessary, important 70 years after the event? Partly, of course, because truth is important, but also because Rosalind Franklin has become representative of women’s fight to be recognised in science – where sexism is still embedded.
Franklin was not a victim because she was robbed (by Watson) of her data, or robbed of her rightful Nobel Prize, she was a full collaborator. She was not side-lined – although she was subject to exclusion from the Senior Common Room at King’s College because she was a woman (and Jewish at that). She made the contribution only a physical chemist and crystallographer could make, joining biophysicist Maurice Wilkins, and molecular biologists, Watson and Crick in the discovery of them all. Watson and Crick were the theoreticians, Wilkins and Franklin were the experimental scientists. The discovery of DNA belongs, equally, to all of them.
Which is just how science should be!
