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Comment by jll29 | Hacker News Reader

> “Jim [James Watson] now holds the view that women can’t be great at anything,” and certainly not science.

Watson and Crick are notorious for having secretly accessed and used Rosalind Elsie Franklin's personal x-ray images (of DNA) while she was not in the lab.

To me, Franklin is the real hero in discovering the DNA's structure, and she should have received the Nobel prize (50%), perhaps jointly with Watson (25%) and Crick (25%).

Objective scientific research means: never let your personal prejudice or ideology clout your own search for truth. The fact that Watson and Crick did not even mention or cite Franklin's article, which ironically even appeared in the same issue of _Nature_ as Watson and Crick's paper, is most dishonorable and dishonest.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosalind_Franklin

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I disagree with this assessment.

Franklin didn't have the tools and process for determining the structure of DNA, only Watson and Crick did, because they used actual physical models to measure the angles and positions of the molecular components.

Further, by the time Watson and Crick did their work, Franklin had already left to work on the tobacco mosaic virus (TMV)[0].

That Watson and Crick could only nail the structure of DNA because of her crystallography work is almost certain. That she would have discovered the structure of DNA without them and their process/approach is a furphy[1]. It's their combined efforts which made it possible, with Franklin's work being the pointer in the right direction and confirmation, but Watson and Crick's being the bulk of the heavy-lifting necessary to map the molecule structure.

In the end, she probably didn't share in the Nobel because she died before the prize was awarded for the research.

[0] https://www.cinz.nz/posts/rosalind-elsie-franklin-1920-1958 [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Furphy

Franklin held Gosling back from collaborating with Wilkins, which probably would have moved up the discovery of the structure of DNA by a year.

Photo 51 was Gosling's work, which Franklin had looked at briefly in May 1952 and had been ignoring ever since. She never worked on it. Gosling writes: "Rosalind was going to leave, so she suggested that I go down the corridor and give this beautiful structure B pattern, this photo 51, to Maurice." [Wilkins] This was in the context of Gosling returning to Wilkins, who was his original DNA-structure supervisor before Franklin began working with DNA.

That's interesting and different from the usual telling of the story you get.

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