(of Watson and Crick fame)
I feel like its important for me to share here that the publicly accepted, revised version of the Rosalind Franklin story is still not at all accurate, is sexist, and (most importantly) was introduced and perpetuated BY Watson.
Excluding her from the entire story around the discovery of the double helix is incorrect, yes.
But the common story of her holding the key to the double helix and not knowing it until Watson/Crick/Wilkins stole and saw it and had a eureka moment is also incorrect and perpetuating sexism.
This is a really good long-form article about her actual role in the discovery of the double helix. They dug through letters/unpublished article drafts etc to show that Rosalind Franklin was an active discoverer of key facts about DNA. Where, yes, she was disadvantaged by her a) being a physical chemist and b) being professionally isolated and not being able to bounce ideas off of a team due to her sex.
Some key paragraphs from the article that articulate the above more:
According to Watson, in early 1953, he visited King’s and got into a row with Franklin. Wilkins, he wrote, rescued him from the confrontation and then showed him Photograph 51, a particularly clear image of the B form, taken 8 months earlier by Franklin and her graduate student Raymond Gosling. 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. Gosling was now being supervised by Wilkins, and he had given Wilkins the photograph. (He says he did so with Franklin’s knowledge9.) The image, Watson claimed in The Double Helix, showed that a DNA helix “must exist” — only a helical structure could produce those marks8. Because of Watson’s narrative, people have made a fetish of Photograph 51. It has become the emblem of both Franklin’s achievement and her mistreatment.
But Watson’s narrative contains an absurd presumption. It implies that Franklin, the skilled chemist, could not understand her own data, whereas he, a crystallographic novice, apprehended it immediately. Moreover, everyone, even Watson, knew it was impossible to deduce any precise structure from a single photograph — other structures could have produced the same diffraction pattern. Without careful measurements — which Watson has insisted he did not make — all the image revealed was that the B form was probably some kind of helix, which no one doubted. Furthermore, various lines of evidence — including The Double Helix itself, read carefully — show that it played little, if any, part in Watson and Crick’s inching towards the correct structure between January and March 1953.
So what did she discover?
Franklin contributed several key insights to the discovery of the double helix. She clearly differentiated the A and B forms, solving a problem that had confused previous researchers. (X-ray diffraction experiments in the 1930s had inadvertently used a mixture of the A and B forms of DNA, yielding muddy patterns that were impossible to fully resolve.) Her measurements told her that the DNA unit cell was enormous; she also determined the C2 symmetry exhibited by that unit cell
Franklin also grasped, independently, one of the fundamental insights of the structure: how, in principle, DNA could specify proteins. In February 1953, she was working hard to finish her analyses of DNA before leaving King’s. The A form had continued to resist her attempts to interpret it, so she had turned to the much simpler, clearly helical B form. Her notes reveal that by late February, she had accepted that the A form was also probably helical, with two strands, and she had realized that the order of the bases on a given strand had no effect on the overall structure. This meant that any sequence of bases was possible. As she noted, “an infinite variety of nucleotide sequences would be possible to explain the biological specificity of DNA”
And, why couldn't she build upon these discoveries?
Franklin did not apprehend complementary base-pairing — that A could bond only with T and C only with G, with each pair of bases forming an identical structure in the molecule. In fact, she was not working with the correct forms of the bases, so she could not have made a satisfactory model had she tried (the same was true of Watson and Crick until the very last phase of their work). Neither did she realize that her data implied that the two strands were oriented in different directions — or that the B form, found at high levels of humidity, must be the biologically functional form. (The A form is found only under laboratory conditions.) She did not have time to make these final leaps, because Watson and Crick beat her to the answer.
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. Even though some at the time — notably the researchers at King’s and a small flock of what Watson called “minor Cambridge biochemists” — were not happy about Watson and Crick’s use of the King’s group’s data, the lead scientists at the Cavendish — Perutz, Bragg, John Kendrew — thought it was quite normal. And there is no evidence that Franklin thought otherwise.
Rosalind Franklin was a brilliant scientist who actively discovered properties of DNA that we know today. She was incredibly disadvantaged by the sexism of her era, but she had agency. She was active. She contributed. And, most importantly, she didn't need a man to interpret her results for her.
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