> She supposedly sat on the image for months without realizing its significance, only for Watson to understand it at a glance.
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
Linus Pauling may have been the better chemist, but Francis Crick was better prepared to figure out the structure from that particular photograph.
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.
As I learned it, Photograph 51 was so good that anybody with any crystallography experience would have been able to tell the structure at a glance. Exactly, like you said she wanted to sit on it and get more data because, allegedly, she had observed Hoogsteen base pairing, or some other non-canonical base pair that escapes me.
You likely know a lot more than I do about this story, but I will note this piece also says:
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.
My take away from the article is that Watson and Crick were the ones who finally cracked the puzzle, but that Franklin and Wilkins' (and others') findings were a key part.
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.
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.
> 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)?
> Lore has it that the decisive insight for the double helix came when Watson was shown an X-ray image of DNA taken by Franklin — without her permission or knowledge. Known as Photograph 51, this image is treated as the philosopher’s stone of molecular biology, the key to the ‘secret of life’ (not to mention a Nobel prize). In this telling, Franklin, who died of ovarian cancer in 1958 at just 37, is portrayed as a brilliant scientist, but one who was ultimately unable to decipher what her own data were telling her about DNA. She supposedly sat on the image for months without realizing its significance, only for Watson to understand it at a glance.
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".
Franklin... died of ovarian cancer in 1958 at just 37
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.
Dying young is not generally a problem for getting recognition. Certainly there are lots of famous discoverers who died young (Evariste Galois comes to mind, but is maybe too extreme an example to be representative).
I agree the impact of informal communication likely played an underrated role.
Was she excluded from that world of informal exchanges due to pride, personality, or sexism? I can guess myself. That blurb doesn't necessarily mean that she was bad at networking.
Rosalind Franklin wrote an obituary for the helix theory.[1] She thought her image debunked the helix theory, even though when you know the double helix structure of DNA you can very clearly see it in the X-ray image.
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.
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.
My favorite candidate for 'getting cheated for credit' on the DNA discovery is Erwin Chargaff, whose work pointed towards the specific base pairing involved. Of course, the arbitrary 3-person cutoff for Nobel Prizes is not at all reflective of how science is done in practice in terms of the numbers of people involved over time in any major discovery:
> "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."
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:
My favorite anecdote with Chargaff is how he first told Linus Pauling about how the ratio between the nucleotide pairs A-T and C-G is constant on a sea voyage. Pauling thought he was unpleasant and ignored him. It turns out you need to sometimes be sociable to stay in the history books.
To all those commenting regarding IQ and it’s heritability, a) of course there are genetic factors relating to attributes arising from brain function. However the entire concept of IQ, focusing as it does on a selective subset of cognitive abilities, is a flawed measure of “general intelligence”. I personally know of a very highly rated individual who despite their astronomical IQ, is introverted to the point of being a hermit, and who’s prodigious intellect has never been applied to any external endeavour. What value then such intelligence if it produces nothing, changes nothing, and affects nothing? IQ is to general intelligence as height is to beauty. A single factor among many. I believe that those insisting on trotting out IQ studies as a basis for insisting on the superiority or inferiority of one race with respect to another.
This article explains that Watson and Crick used Franklins work and that Franklin knew about it- really science as it is supposed to work. There was no eureka moment from stealing data but instead Watson and Crick spent months modeling the structure based on knowledge from the report of Franklins group that already stated it could potentially be a helix. The article concludes:
> 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.
I thought, for a long while, that school did teach this during Bio class (at least I learnt that in AP Bio). Being honest science research is already hard enough and all honours belong to a lot more others in the field.
I'll be the one to sacrifice my Internet Points by bringing up the notion that the question of who discovered DNA's structure is not nearly as important as is the question of why the question of who discovered DNA's structure is significant. It is, of course, primarily and famously the specter of the erasure of women from scientifically and socially significant developments, the thematic subject that this article addresses.
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.
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?
> is not nearly as important as is the question of why the question of who discovered DNA's structure is significant.
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?
Quite. It is likely true that deep conceptual shifts within twentieth-century science have undermined what's commonly referred to as Cartesian-Newtonian metaphysics. Revisionist studies in the history and philosophy of science have cast further doubt on its credibility, and, most recently, feminist and poststructuralist critiques have demystified the substantive content of mainstream Western scientific practice, revealing the ideology of domination concealed behind the façade of "objectivity".
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.
pazimzadeh|2 years ago
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
btilly|2 years ago
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.
zinclozenge|2 years ago
DoreenMichele|2 years ago
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.
bowwoden|2 years ago
nextos|2 years ago
hgsgm|2 years ago
zabzonk|2 years ago
failingslowly|2 years ago
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.
Maursault|2 years ago
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.
908B64B197|2 years ago
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...
slibhb|2 years ago
Wilkins also shared the Nobel. Franklin was dead at that point (though I don't think 4 people can share a Nobel).
rayiner|2 years ago
[deleted]
slibhb|2 years ago
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".
mjfl|2 years ago
DoreenMichele|2 years ago
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.
andrewflnr|2 years ago
I agree the impact of informal communication likely played an underrated role.
msrenee|2 years ago
jeffreyrogers|2 years ago
[1]: https://www.researchgate.net/figure/An-obituary-written-by-R...
wrycoder|2 years ago
maire|2 years ago
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.
selimthegrim|2 years ago
AlbertCory|2 years ago
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.
photochemsyn|2 years ago
> "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...
mihaic|2 years ago
nyankosensei|2 years ago
phs318u|2 years ago
sacrosancty|2 years ago
[deleted]
gregwebs|2 years ago
> 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.
hatsune|2 years ago
KevSlater|2 years ago
stanwesley|2 years ago
underlipton|2 years ago
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.
dang|2 years ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
khazhoux|2 years ago
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?
jyscao|2 years ago
That's your own biased judgment. Others may perceive what happened as Watson speaking truth to power, and paying the price for it.
908B64B197|2 years ago
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...
boringuser2|2 years ago
[deleted]
tpoacher|2 years ago
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.