What Rosalind Franklin contributed to the discovery of DNA’s structure
nature.com
nature.com
That's not the lore as I learned it. The lore is that Franklin sat on the data for months before analyzing it (she wanted to collect more data). Then W+C visited her lab and saw the data, but did not instantly understand it. Instead, the lore is that they figured out the structure of the DNA through a combination of going on daily walks, playing with models, and taking LSD.
It is Linus Pauling who would have been able to instantly figure out the structure of DNA by glancing at Photograph 51. His initial theory had been that the phosphates were on the inside of the structure, which in hindsight would never work because the negative charges would repel each other.
Source: Don't remember the primary source, but we covered it in Martin Stranathan's AP Bio class in high school
But as https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/1464518031000160... points out, the analysis technique that makes it possible to deduce the structure from the image was first developed 2 years earlier in a paper by Crick, Cochran and Vand. Note the lead author. In 1953, Francis Crick was one of a handful of people on the planet who would have made the connection. In fact he was able to make it from James Watson's description of the photograph! Rosalind Franklin can be pardoned for having failed to make the connection.
The fact that Crick was the world expert on the one obscure thing about crystallography that mattered here doesn't mean that Franklin wasn't the real expert. Every expert has gaps in their knowledge.
The necessary analysis technique was first developed 2 years earlier, in a paper that Crick was the lead author on. Chance favors the prepared mind. And Crick was extremely well-prepared for this task.
This particular issue is quite complicated. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photo_51
https://www.encyclopedia.com/science-and-technology/biology-...
Franklin had put the photograph aside to concentrate on the A form. She was preparing to transfer to Birkbeck College, also in London, and had been instructed to leave her DNA work behind.
It's telling that the controversy only surrounds Franklin's contributions, not Wilkins', presumably because of her gender and the need to promote women's historical contribution to science. I understand the desire to do that, as the theory goes that girls can only be interested in science if they know of women who have excelled previously. (I'm not sure I completely buy this, but I'm not about to die on that hill.)
However, I'm glad this article was published, as it gives some balance to what has become (as per) a deeply biased and divisive discussion, mostly, I have to say, by the myth-making and narratives of one side.
To add a personal anecdote, I'll note that my son was straight-up taught (by his female science teacher) that Watson and Crick did not discover the structure of DNA but stole it from Franklin. I'm still not sure I've completely disabused him of this idea.
Can you imagine what else they are teaching him (with your tax dollars)?
Anti-Racist math perhaps? [0]
[0] https://equitablemath.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2020/11...
Wilkins also shared the Nobel. Franklin was dead at that point (though I don't think 4 people can share a Nobel).
What puzzle, precisely? That DNA is a double helix? The article makes it clear that Franklin was already aware of this fact when Watson and Crick had their epiphany. Watson's and Crick's insight that was independent of Franklin had to do with the base pairs, but every article and film and book (including Watson's) and story I know of focuses on the realization that DNA is a double helix. Turns out, that was already known by Franklin and Wilkins prior to Watson and Crick seeing Photograph 51. This changes things. Frankly, I don't even understand Watson's contribution even by his own testimony; Crick and Franklin did all the heavy lifting.
I don't think this is what Watson wrote in The Double Helix. He wrote that Crick, with his background in math and physics, could understand the image produced by Franklin but that he -- Watson -- could not.
Watson does write that Franklin thought DNA wasn't helical. The linked article provides an interesting explanation for why she thought that (at least at one time). As far as I can tell, that backs up Watson's narrative rather than undermining it.
One interesting takeaway from The Double Helix was that Watson and Crick cracked the problem with guess-and-check model building (the article mentions this). Sure, they had some vague idea that DNA was a helix and that A-T, C-G relatinoship, but they basically played with tinker toys until they got something that looked good. Watson claims that they decided on a double helix because of his intuition that "in biology, important things occur in pairs".
This is news to me. I've heard before that supposedly her work was "stolen" by men in the field. I have always thought it more likely that she thought she needed more evidence or something like that. Women seem to have trouble getting good mentors and, like Vinny in My Cousin Vinny, may be weak when it comes to procedure -- aka the culture of the appropriate way to do things and get it taken seriously, etc.
Knowing she died so young makes me think this is largely why she "lacked adequate recognition" in the eyes of people crying sexism. I doubt that. I've heard of her and heard hand-wavy versions of how some guy stole from her or whatever but never looked into it because such stories tend to be framed in a way that frequently strikes me as biased and counterproductive as a woman trying to find my own path forward.
Women do face challenges. My opinions as to what those challenges are tend to differ from popular framing.
And this section fits more with my view of such things:
Franklin did not succeed, partly because she was working on her own without a peer with whom to swap ideas. She was also excluded from the world of informal exchanges in which Watson and Crick were immersed.
It also strikes me as an unfortunate happenstance and not a conscious and intentional plot to deny women career advancement.
It was the height of the housewife era. Women were actively discouraged from working and there was a massive amount of clear and outright sexism towards those who chose to have a career. It seems much more likely to me that they didn't consider her an equal part of the team and that's why she was left out of the story.
The height of the housewife era was funded in part by the high savings rates during WW2 when many married couples were de facto DINKs -- dual income, no kids -- because she was Rosie the Riveter, he was serving in the military overseas and, as Lucille Ball once said, you can't exactly get pregnant by phoning it in.
Furthermore, most scenarios contain myriad factors and I'm much more interested in finding a path forward than in figuring out who to blame for the past.
Sure, but it didn't help that women were encouraged (or forced) to leave their jobs so that the returning men could have them. It's not coincidental that "Kelly Girl Services" and the general temp agency (which has been so much bad for both women and men in terms of wages, job security, and promotion opportunities) took off in this era. Or Freidan's best-seller status in 1963.
> I'm much more interested in finding a path forward than in figuring out who to blame for the past.
Blame helps in figuring out what to address. At the very least a sense of past injustice motivates people in the present to address present wrongs.
It's important to cast blame for the actions and attitudes of people, because the basic motivations behind those actions and attitudes don't change, they're effectively eternal with the human race. The light needs to constantly be shined on them, or you get women like Eileen Bailey and Ann Coles[1], or men like Eddie Slovik[2]. The shining of the light is the path forward, or at least a part of it. Does it matter whether COVID came from a Chinese lab or a wet market, now? No. But the shining of the light on the bad practices at both places is the most likely way to see that both sets of practices are corrected. (I do think it was stupid to cast blame back in 2020 and 21, when really we needed to be better addressing the critical urgency of contagion.)
1 - https://daily.jstor.org/what-really-made-1950s-housewives-so...
If you look for someone to blame, you will find someone to blame. But that someone may be a scapegoat.
The US legal system is based on an assumption of innocence. I find it personally useful to try to assess history from an assumption of innocence.
Many phenomenon are emergent phenomenon that cannot be blamed on any one thing.
If I think someone is actually guilty of something in specific, I have no problem saying that. I just don't find an assumption of guilt useful in the general case for parsing how to do this better.
> If you look for someone to blame, you will find someone to blame. But that someone may be a scapegoat.
For Eileen Bailey I first blame her husband cheating, and then I blame his friends at the tennis club for not letting her know about it.
For Ann Coles I blame her husband for his personality disorder, and a society that told women to deal with it.
For Eddie Slovik I blame conscription, which may not have even been necessary in WWII following Pearl Harbor[1]. And an attitude against youthful petty criminals from the lower classes (this continued for decades as petty criminals were encouraged to join the military to get their lives in order and avoid their sentences, at least according to pop culture).
None of these attitudes (save, temporarily, conscription) have materially changed. People still cheat on their spouses. Spouses are still (though much less so today) told to accept it. Friends of the cheater still don't always feel they can, or should, let the other spouse know. People are still told to address societal issues by changing, or medicating, themselves. Youthful offenders are still permanently tarred in the mind of society.
We have improved in considering divorce more acceptable. And this is partly because of a collective blaming of the cheating spouse (with the other part mainly being the increased frequency of divorce).
1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selective_Training_and_Service...
It's nice when two people can make their marriage work and be happily monogamous. It's unfortunate that we collectively haven't yet sorted out how to establish happy monogamy more reliably.
For your second example, blaming someone for their personality disorder isn't reasonable. People don't wake up one morning and go "I think I would like to acquire a personality disorder for funsies." It's unfortunate that humanity has yet to establish a solid track record for fixing mental health issues.
Last, according to the link you submitted in your previous comment:
Although over 21,000 American soldiers were given varying sentences for desertion during World War II, including 49 death sentences, Slovik's death sentence was the only one that was carried out.
I still have no idea at all what or who you are trying to blame with your third example or what you are trying to say you wish were different.
We all have a responsibility for not making the lives of the close to, or dependent upon us, miserable. And if we can't do that we have the responsibility of ending our relationship. A personality disorder is ultimately a collection of excuses and rationales as to why we are more important than the other. Naming this a "personality disorder" doesn't eliminate responsibility, or blame.
> It's unfortunate that we collectively haven't yet sorted out how to establish happy monogamy more reliably.
It's fine if we haven't, there are plenty of people who are very straightforward about being non-monomgamous, and plenty of others who have tried to be monogamous but called it off after a time once they found out that they couldn't maintain it, or at the very least were truthful about their infidelity to their spouse if they couldn't, for some reason, end the marriage, and were respectful enough to keep it as out-of-their face as possible. Again, it's the treating others as less important than our own drives that's the problem.
> I still have no idea at all what or who you are trying to blame with your third example or what you are trying to say you wish were different.
1) Conscription is generally a bad idea. Especially in time of peace. Especially when the wars are not wars of defense. And most especially when there isn't a particular problem recruiting volunteers.
2) Don't make examples of people who come from shitty situations, and have made it clear time and time again that they won't do what you're asking of them.
3) Don't punish people harder for unrelated crimes, personality defects, or just things that you, personally, find annoying or less than worthwhile about them. This is what implicit bias research is attempting to address.
People are important in and of themselves. Not as extensions of you (or more broadly, whatever the government has deemed important). Even though he got paid for it, Slovik was essentially treated as a slave, and executed for disobeying his masters. Whereas 21,000+ other "slaves" were pardoned because their masters didn't find them to be all that bad.
I agree the impact of informal communication likely played an underrated role.
Scientists et al tend to be recognized in old age or after their death, not while still relatively young. This is so true that we have special awards specifically designed to recognize people under a certain age, such as The Fields Medal for mathematicians under age 40.
There are 64 Fields Medalist. Only one is a woman.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fields_Medal#:~:text=In%2020....
Edit: I will add that the first person to win a Nobel Prize twice, and the only person to win a Nobel Prize in two scientific fields is a woman: Marie Curie.
Scientific recognition tends to come in old age or posthumously. She's getting hers posthumously.
That's not some bizarroland weird statistical outlier that only happens to women due to sexism denying them credit during their lifetime.
Gregor Mendel is remembered as the father of genetics. His work wasn't recognized until 30 years or so after his death.
Alfred Wegener came up with the theory of plate tectonics. It didn't gain acceptance until 20 years or so after his death.
[1]: https://www.researchgate.net/figure/An-obituary-written-by-R...
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/article/rosalind-franklin-lega...
My take away was that Rosalind Franklin did support the Watson Crick paper but that there was some conflict leading up to the paper. She did not seem to think her ideas were stolen.
It did not help that after Franklin died - Watson wrote a hit piece on Franklin. I think that is what caused people to question if Watson was above board while Franklin was alive.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H9TUTf4T7cI
what I recall him saying was nothing about Jewishness or women: he says, I think I remember, that Franklin "did not see faces," i.e. he thought she was partially autistic. (go to 35:00 in the talk)
At the time, he was researching the heritability of autism.
That was his explanation for why she didn't enjoy talking to people, especially those who were her rivals.
> "Key conclusions from Erwin Chargaff's work are now known as Chargaff's rules. The first and best known achievement was to show that in natural DNA the number of guanine units equals the number of cytosine units and the number of adenine units equals the number of thymine units."
> "The second of Chargaff's rules is that the composition of DNA varies from one species to another, in particular in the relative amounts of A, G, T, and C bases. Such evidence of molecular diversity, which had been presumed absent from DNA, made DNA a more credible candidate for the genetic material than protein."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erwin_Chargaff#Chargaff's_rule...
Not to distract from Rosalind Franklin's contributions, but if anyone is looking for a female role model in molecular biology and biochemistry with a major influence and a long career, Barbara McClintock is probably at or near the top of that list:
https://www.nature.com/scitable/topicpage/barbara-mcclintock...
> Rosalind Franklin has been reduced to the “wronged heroine” of the double helix22,23. She deserves to be remembered not as the victim of the double helix, but as an equal contributor to the solution of the structure.
There is another aspect of this significance, however, in the way that James Watson's impropriety - in his work, and in his telling of the story of his work - reflects on, and is reflected by, his later racist and sexist intellectual misadventures. The myth of a singular - well, dual - genius who moves humanity forward lends credence to his bigotry - how can the father of genetic science be wrong about the influence of genetics on society? - while the truth dashes that credibility (without necessarily undoing the significance of his actual contributions). And it is a controversy that gets re-litigated perennially not because people truly care that much about the discovery or discovers, but because our understanding of these events underpin beliefs, our understanding of the world, that are as sharply relevant today as a shard of glass.
To retreat to attempting an exhaustive reconstruction of events might be comfortable, but it is also a bit dangerous - it assumes a totality of understanding that may be found wanting - and, more importantly, it misses the core of why the controversy exists in the first place. Peer esteem may be foremost on an academic's mind, but we've long left the ivory tower on this one.
It has thus become increasingly apparent that physical "reality", no less than social "reality", is at bottom a social and linguistic construct; that scientific "knowledge", far from being objective, reflects and encodes the dominant ideologies and power relations of the culture that produced it; that the truth claims of science are inherently theory-laden and self-referential; and consequently, that the discourse of the scientific community, for all its undeniable value, cannot assert a privileged epistemological status with respect to counter-hegemonic narratives emanating from dissident or marginalized communities.
It is ultimately an irony that the epistemological position--that Civilization is fundamentally about domination and cannot stand marginalized or dissident narratives--has only and could only flourish under civilizations in their least-connected-to-quotidian-life institutions. It requires being sheltered to recognize that ultimately everything is a social and linguistic construct. Everyone else doesn't have the luxury and are just trying to survive.
Even further, the idea that everything reduces to social and linguistic games isn't new. It is one of the oldest ideas in history found in both Buddhism (through depedent coarising) and in Graeco-Roman philosophy culminating in Christianity (the Logos). Both institutions developed monasticism for precisely the same reasons.
This world isn't real. You have to be out of this world to see the illusion behind it and to be free from it.
Everyone does not have to stop pretending it's real for you to stop pretending it's real.
A king is only a social construct. One can still order your head cut off.
oh well.
That's your own biased judgment. Others may perceive what happened as Watson speaking truth to power, and paying the price for it.
Is there any reason to believe that they would have been more generous in giving credit had the work been from a man? And are there not dozens of other researchers who Watson and Crick drew inspiration and results from, who are not listed on the Nobel Prize?
The what-ifs of one specific notable instance doesn't really matter. This is merely being used for illustrative purposes.
It is also the case that it is not just women who are denied credit, but until relatively recently it was common practice to not even think to give equal credit to women.
> And are there not dozens of other researchers who Watson and Crick drew inspiration and results from, who are not listed on the Nobel Prize?
This direct? No. Franklin generated the key bit of information from which anyone generally adept in the discipline of the time could verify the double-helical nature of DNA.
Stated more cynically, it's being used to craft a narrative in support of an agenda.
No. Her student did.
I feel there's a push now to go find people of the right race or gender that were adjacent to scientific achievement and somewhat exaggerate their contributions or their importance. Like Ada Lovelace or Katherine Johnson. There's even a British government employee who decided to write 1000+ wikipedia pages for early career scientists of the same gender as her [0].
I don't know how this trend is going to look back in retrospect, because to me this could have the side effect of reinforcing impostor syndrome for people of the same demographics.
> how can the father of genetic science be wrong about the influence of genetics on society?
What does Gregor Mendel has to do with this?
[0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/2022/10/17/jess-wad...