she got it wrong.http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/fire-in-the-mind/2013/04/2...
The issue with Watson's original account is here in the Johnson's text:
After negotiations between both labs, papers by Wilkins and by Franklin and Gosling appeared in the same issue of Nature along with the one by Watson and Crick. (They can all be found on a website at Nature, and an annotated version of the Watson-Crick paper is at the Exploratorium’s site.) Toward the end of their paper, they flatly state that “We were not aware of the details of the results presented [by the King’s scientists] when we devised our structure, which rests mainly though not entirely on published experimental data and stereochemical arguments.” Yet they go on to write in an acknowledgment, three paragraphs later: “We have also been stimulated by a knowledge of the general nature of the unpublished experimental results and ideas of Dr. M. H. F. Wilkins, Dr. R. E. Franklin and their co-workers at King’s College, London.”
The sentences seem to contradict each other, and in any case Watson made a point, in his book The Double Helix, to describe the pivotal moment when he saw Photo 51.
So the controversy continues. Was it ethical for Wilkins to show Watson his colleague’s work without asking her first? Should she have been invited to be a coauthor on the historic paper? Watson hardly helped his case with his belittling comments about Franklin in The Double Helix.
The bigger issue from the original Hacker News post is Watson and also Feynman's portrayal of their work as highly independent of their colleagues: "disregarding" others.
I'd appreciate it if you could state clearly whether you think
- F. got it wrong, or
- she knew/assumed early on that it was a helix, but lied about it?
Thank you.
As to whether the X-rays should have been seen by Crick/Watson, The research was publically funded. Publically funded research should be open and transparent. Or do you disagree with transparency of taxpayer money? Would it have even been legally possible for F. to refuse the communication of her tax-payer funded results?