Kind of building on my earlier comments on Tesla and people who were at the time obscure who went on to be folk heroes of science while their competitors are now demonized: I keep seeing on Tumblr people saying that Watson and Crick “stole” the concept of DNA from Rosalind Franklin.
This is not merely a gross simplification, but outright wrong, and shows a very poor understanding of scientific research and publishing.
At King’s College, Franklin worked in a biophysics unit under John Randall, alongside Maurice Wilkins and Raymond Gosling, who had previously used crude x-ray equipment that obtained the first images of DNA. Franklin, a master at X-ray engineering, rapidly refined the diffraction techniques of the equipment, bringing a great deal of clarity to the images. In fact, she was so highly prized by Randall that she was directly appointed to take charge of the analysis and guidance of Gosling’s thesis, and this sudden shake-up in the team is what lead to much of the early friction in the unit, especially as Franklin and Wilkins had strongly opposed ways of communicating (accusations that it was purely a matter of sexism kind of fall flat in the face of Randall’s relatively large population of female researchers in the unit, at 7). Franklin was very direct and curt, while Wilkins was noted as being withdrawn, evasive, and soft-spoken. Notably, despite the current narrative, Wilkins was correct in their earliest conflict: he believed that both A and B forms DNA were helical, while she, running on faulty data, held that crystalline DNA (the A-form) was an asymmetrical form.
However, by January 1953, she had refined her techniques and corrected this error, and published her results on A-DNA on March 6th, one day before Watson and Crick finalized their B-DNA model. Neither of them knew of or could have plagiarized the other’s work; science is often a blind race between distinct research groups working from common data and theories.
The idea that Watson and Crick deliberately shut down Franklin is belied by their earliest interaction; Watson, having read the erroneous preliminary proposal for DNA’s structure by Linus Pauling and Corey, travelled to King’s College to meet with its research unit. As Wilkins was not in the office, he approached Franklin to prose a collaboration between the two teams to beat a possible correction on Pauling’s part to the journals. Franklin was frankly unimpressed by the offer, so Watson turned to Wilkins.
It was at this point that the controversy starts: Watson at this point shares Pauling, Corey, et al.’s incorrect model. This model greatly resembles the early incorrect models of both Watson-Crick and the Randall group. Once again, not because of intellectual theft, but because it was a very obvious conclusion to draw from the data. It was then that Wilkins shared Franklin’s DNA x-ray work, most famously the beautiful Photo 51. It was at this point that everything began to click- the model was double helical, empirically disproving Pauling’s alpha helix and supporting the Watson-Crick model already in development at Cavendish Lab at Cambridge, which in large part was inspired by the Randall group. The point of contention between Watson and Franklin at this point was whether building a model should be undertaken before a majority of the structure was known, with Franklin opposing it and Watson obviously having already mostly completed his and Crick’s famous work. She wasn’t pushed out so much as she willingly withdrew; Franklin was a deeply cautious, methodical mind devoted to rigorous lab work, which caused tension when everyone else wanted to get a model and paper to the presses as soon as possible, especially with the threat of the absolute scientific giant of Pauling always on their mind, the amount of speculation and hypothetical gap-fillers be damned.
Here is the second big point of controversy: Franklin successfully published two A-DNA papers in Acta Crystallographia, and transfered to Birkbeck College. However, Randall ruled that her research would stay at King’s. Whether she deserved to have proprietary rights to her research is up for debate, but consistent for university groups at the time. She remained involved in the hunt for a DNA model but expressed skepticism at the Cavendish model, saying that while “it was very pretty, how were they going to prove it?”
Now, some commentators have claimed that Watson and Crick stole data from her and Wilkins, only acknowledging their unpublished work in a footnote, which is an outright tarring attempt; they frequently acknowledged the Randall group’s published works, and actually struck a deal between both research labs and Nature to publish Franklin and Gosling’s data in the same issue. Wilkins was approached to be a co-author of their paper, and declined, saying he had taken no part in the building of the physical model at the core of the published paper. Indeed, one must wonder how one cites unpublished images in a more rigorous way than the one they use.
Franklin remained skeptical, as did most of her peers; for several years, the model was only slightly accepted in the larger scientific community, and was only widely approved of once geneticists kept finding that it fit with their findings without contradictions, and findings in early information theory.
Franklin, at this point, moved on to structural analysis of RNA, and arguably was more crucial to the analysis of RNA and its implications in virology than she was to the final model of DNA; she overturned prior theories on virus particle length and reproduction and, most importantly, provided major insight into the structure and propagation of polio. She bravely volunteered to work with live polio cultures, though was forced to discontinue this research as her rapidly deteriorating health became a concern for colleagues; X-ray and viral eposure, along with a family history of cancer, led to a simultaneous and fatal development of ovarian cancer, carcinomatosis, and bronchopnrumonia. She passed away one day before her model of the tobacco mosaic virus was set for display at the International Science Pavillion, 1958.
Franklin wasn’t shut out of the Nobel Prize awarded in 1962; the Nobel is not rewarded posthumously, and Watson, Crick, and even her rival, Wilkins openly acknowledged her contributions, and Watson claimed that, ideally, Wilkins and Franklin should have shared the Nobel in Chemistry independently. Furthermore, they were awarded not just for the DNA structure, but for a great deal of groundbreaking work on genetics and nucleic acids. She was also acknowledged a second time during the Nobel ceremony of 1982, as Franklin’s grad student, co-author, and majority beneficiary of her will, Aaron Klum, received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for their work on crystallography. The 1982 Prize lead to an explosion of awards, honors, and statues dedicated to Franklin. If anything, it was Wilkins and Gosling who were kind of pushed out of the limelight of scientific history.
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