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Comment by coredog64 | Hacker News Reader

> A similar fate befell Dr. Rosalind Franklin, the chemist excluded from the Nobel awarded to her colleagues James Watson, Francis Crick, and Maurice Wilkins for the discovery of DNA.

Franklin's name is a link to a paywalled Medium article. Found a copy expecting to see some nuanced discussion about the specific contributions she made, only to find that the missing bits were that they were mean to her about her lipstick and dress selection.

Maybe it's true, maybe it's not, but making the entire debate about her looks isn't doing anyone any favors.

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Rosalind Franklin would never have gotten a Nobel Prize. She died from cancer in 1958, three years before the Watson, Crick and Wilkins were awarded their prize, and Nobel was very clear that his award could not be awarded posthumously. Only ~three people have gotten posthumous awards, and all of them were alive on February 1st of the year they got the award.

Wilkins (Franklin's boss) taking her data without her permission and sharing it with Watson and Crick so they could jump in at the end and analyze it faster than she did- and then not even put her name on the paper but Wilkins instead!- is truly classic academic evil. However, even if they had actually collaborated and Franklin's name had been on the paper, she would not have gotten a Nobel, due to the ovarian cancer that killed her at age 37.

Her name is listed in the acknowledgements and she has a paper in the same issue as Watson&Crick. Also, there's evidence now that her data had already been shared in a departmental seminar when Wilkins shared it with Watson & Crick (I believe this is explained in detail in the Eighth Day of Creation, where the author did deep historical digging).

I don't think she would have concluded that the structure of DNA was a double helix with antiparallel strands (that's the important bit).

Yes, she had a paper, hastily thrown together because Watson and Crick were going to publish her data without her consent, and even to the men of 1952, what they had done to her was seen as pretty scuzzy, so they tried to give her an opportunity to at least claim a little credit. But this is a sign that even the the people around them saw that Franklin had been done wrong by Watson and Crick and Wilkins.

As far as "she shared it in a departmental seminar once, therefore her boss can just give it to others to beat her in the analysis phase without her consent" and "I don't think she would have gotten it right," neither of those are actually arguments. One of them is not how science is supposed to be done, the other is an un-provable assertion that a woman wasn't smart enough to figure something out, which makes me a little suspicious.

How exactly did you get to "a woman wasn't smart enough to figure something out, which makes me a little suspicious."? It sounds like you're saying I think she wasn't smart? I am merely reporting the facts as they have been reported, based on a number of different books/articles.

It was an intrinsically hard problem that Crick was especially prepared to solve. I doubt the vast majority of scientists, regardless of their sex, would have been able to solve the problem with the data they had.

Generally once you share data publicly, there is a blanket rule that people can use that data. Many people claim W&C stole the data (through Wilkins) but that does not seem to be true.

The person really getting written out of history in this thread is Raymond Gosling, the PhD student, who actually took the famous "Photo 51"[0] that, along with other evidence, confirmed Watson and Crick's pre-existing hypothesis about the structure of DNA.

As Franklin was leaving the lab, Wilkins became Gosling's supervisor and the rest is history. Describing it as "her data" is not accurate -- the image belonged to King's College, not Franklin personally.

Whether or not Franklin received sufficient credit for her contributions I will leave to others to debate.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photo_51

"In a full description of the structure in a paper submitted in August 1953 and published in 1954, Crick and Watson did attempt to set the record straight17. They acknowledged that, without Franklin’s data, “the formulation of our structure would have been most unlikely, if not impossible”, and implicitly referred to the MRC report as a “preliminary report” in which Franklin and Wilkins had “independently suggested that the basic structure of the paracrystalline [B] form is helical and contains two intertwined chains”."

What Rosalind Franklin truly contributed to the discovery of DNA’s structure - https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-01313-5

> Maybe it's true, maybe it's not, but making the entire debate about her looks isn't doing anyone any favors.

There isn’t really much modern “debate” about Franklin’s work, though her Wikipedia entry is much better than that particular article. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosalind_Franklin

> Franklin's name is a link to a paywalled Medium article.

I'm frustrated that in 2025, I am reading a dismissal of Franklin's contributions because someone has never heard of her and clicks on a link to Medium article to draw their conclusions. Wikipedia would be better. The 1950's was so long ago that there are (gasp) actual paper books on this history of the discovery of the double helix.

They followed the provided link, blame the person who posted the link not the person who says the link wasn't helpful.

If you try to back up your points with citations then those citations should help strengthen your case, you might still be right even if you cite bad articles but its still right to criticize bad citations.

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