If I read Franklin's notes this establishes that she did in fact conceive of a double helix and base complementarity in the center (I can't see if she also recognized it was antiparallel).
That's the first actual evidence I've seen (I am a DNA nerd and have been trying to understand what her contribution to the intellectual discovery of DNA's double-helix antiparalel).
I would need to go back to Judson's book (Eighth Day of Creation) and see if he actually missed this.
I'm a bit confused about this discussion about whether or not she conceived of a double helix structure as this PBS Nova documentary on DNA includes a scene where they show her notes that have her muse about the possibility of a double or triple helix structure.[0]
As for base complementarity it seems likely that she would have made that leap from everything else that she knew of at the time, but I'm no expert on this subject and have not read her notes.
I happen to be reading Judson right now. Quoting from it here:
> It is easy to feel great sympathy with Franklin. The fact remains that she never made the inductive leap... before she learned about the model proposed by Watson and Crick, she and Gosling began to draft a paper to state their conclusions so far about the B structure. That draft also survived among Franklin’s papers. It was vigorous, clear, and limited. Klug and I went over it one afternoon in his office. “You see, she was lacking one final step,” Klug said. “Well, two steps. What she missed was the presence of the dyad—the symmetry of the molecule. Which Francis had seen immediately from her information about the space group. And even though her notes earlier showed that she knew about Chargaff’s ratios, she never got to the base pairing.”
> Science historian Alistair Sponsel of the Science History Institute and crystallographer Brian Sutton of KCL argue Franklin knew the earlier photo had revealed a helix—the epiphany Watson claimed for himself—and that is precisely why she made a second, more refined version, photograph 51.
It was Watson and Crick who discovered the double helix, even if Franklin did write something down about a single helix from a previous photo that they didn't read.
what? she was doing a form of crystallography that ONLY makes sense if it's a helix? Like, any time you are doing fiber diffraction it's pretty much "a helix". Who claimed she didn't realize it was a helix? I thought the claim was that she didn't recognize the significance of the helical parameters, which of course she couldn't, she wasn't a chemist and didn't have a model in mind with knowable parameters.
She might have measured those parameters, but she still didn't know what she had (as evidenced by how she subsequently spent a ton of time on Z-dna)
I beleive fibre diffraction also works on parallel fibres (non-helical). For example, long chains of beta-sheet (look at beta keratin, which is one of the early non-helical structures analyzed by Astbury).
Technically beta keratin is helical. That said you are correct, there is no requirement to be helical for fiber diffraction. It just turns out it's very difficult to have non helical uniaxial symmetry in nature.
When I was studying spindle shaped viruses by electron microscopy we'd get beautiful fiber diffraction patterns in the fourier transform of the micrographs. I always wanted to try and solve the helical parameters but never got around to it.
The point of the article is not to provide new information.
The point of the article is to create the impression in the reader that Franklin did everything of any importance and was robbed of credit by the white men riding her coattails.
> which of course she couldn't, she wasn't a chemist
Actually, of all of the characters involved, she was the only chemist. Watson was a biologist, Crick was a physicist, as was Wilkins. That's why Franklin was ultimately brought in: to make further progress, they needed a chemist with crystallography experience, and Franklin was the one who had that experience.
Clickbait headline which misframes the controversy, to nobody's benefit.
Helical DNA was the strongest candidate by 51, in part because earlier and cruder X-ray diffraction images had existed for some time (10+ years) and were suggestive of this structure. All of the scientists in question, and many others, collaborated on that possibility at that time, and long before 'Photo 51'. It was not a surprise, but rather the focus of their work.
Franklin was making the famous improved images with the explicit intent of revealing or disproving the helical structure. She and her lab produced the most definitive evidence for helical B-DNA (Photo 51) in early 52, but during 52 the conclusion was still a matter of debate (and humor) amongst them - in particular Franklin was not convinced that A-DNA was helical. From Wiki:
> In July 1952, as a practical joke on Wilkins (who frequently expressed his view that both forms of DNA were helical), Franklin and Gosling produced a funeral notice regretting the 'death' of helical A-DNA
This left the molecular structure and number of strands as open questions. Triple helix models had been attempted by Pauling, Watson and Crick at that time. Watson and Crick though were first to develop the successful double helix model with antiparallel base pairs in early 1953. It is likely that Franklin had also come to the conclusion that DNA was a double helix by this time (based on her draft notes + circumstantial evidence) but she did not do so in total isolation, nor did she did not complete the final molecular part of the puzzle (though she had worked on it).
TL;DR DNA structure was not a eureka moment spurred by a single breakthrough thought or piece of evidence; many scientists collaborated on eliminating various likely possibilities for years until the correct model was found.
Indeed. Brenda Maddox's wonderful biography of Franklin already goes into this in depth, including discussing her notebooks, so I'm not sure what is actually new here.
Franklin was tackling the problem scientifically, with a view that you can only prove or disprove with empirical evidence, and publishing an unsupported model was unscientific. Watson was the tech bro, stealing data and coming up with an untested, unverified model. (Crick was mostly a nice guy hanging with the wrong crowd.)
The massive irony is that Franklin published her crystallographic photos and data in support of the Watson-Crick model, which had of course been derived from her images in the first place, without her knowledge.
I think that still simplifies a bit too much. Wilkins studied DNA structure with several methods from 1948-50 but when his best results were from a modern x-ray diffraction image, Franklin (an expert in the field) was hired to essentially take over the project (which he resented).
The first images that Watson saw were actually taken before Franklin joined the team. Better images (and her analysis of them) were some of the most valuable pieces of evidence for narrowing down the possible structures (e.g. they disproved models by Pauling/Watson/Crick) - but by late 1952 Wilkins felt they had enough data and ought to focus on modelling. Franklin (who certainly had an ego of her own) insisted on continuing with her approach - she was an expert in these techniques after all and was making real progress.
Wilkins (who had been had been open with his own inconclusive results), eventually went over her head and showed the famous images to Watson and Crick. He felt they were sufficient to guide the model building and he was frustrated that Franklin had been withholding them while pursuing the wrong research directions. Franklin mocked him for his views at time, but Wilkins was somewhat vindicated.
I don't think this should be considered ironic, or that the image held all the answers, or that the discovery was stolen. Ultimately her work played exactly the role it was intended to, eliminating candidate models. The subsequent diminishment of that role is the real controversy, and most involved later walked back some of their statements.
I think you're being a little dismissive of Franklin's role here.
If you don't think it's a little ironic to be publishing your xray diffraction patterns to support a model that was only conceived by illicitly viewing those unpublished xray diffraction patterns ... well, I don't know what to say. Perhaps gut-punch would be better than ironical? But Franklin never knew that Watson and Crick had viewed her results prior to forming their model, so she never realised just how much Wilkins had punched her in the gut.
Per Watson and Crick 1953: "We have also been stimulated by a knowledge of the general nature of the unpublished experimental results and ideas of Dr. M. H. F. Wilkins, Dr. R. E. Franklin and their co-workers at King’s College, London." Kinda putting it mildly there, don't you think?
Per Franklin and Gosling's back-to-back publication, 1953, after establishing the molecular features of DNA from their diffraction patterns: "Thus our general ideas are not inconsistent with the model proposed by Watson and Crick in the preceding communication."
Ouch. Well, yes, of course they were not inconsistent -- Watson and Crick took their dimensions exactly from Franklin and Gosling's work in the first place!
Yes, Franklin had an ego, but this was ultimately hers (and Gosling's) research area to pursue. Her approach of obtaining data to then build a model (the way we still do with structural biology!) is hardly something to dismiss. And, after all, there was an agreement that DNA structure would be worked on solely by the King's College group, and not by Watson and Crick at Cambridge. Franklin had no reason to assume that that was being broken, or that she didn't have the time to pursue the structure via a rigorous scientific pathway. Most people forget that the only supporting evidence that the Watson-Crick model was correct, and not simply another spurious model, was from Franklin and Gosling's paper in the same issue of Nature.
I didn't mean to be dismissive of her role, but I would reject the framing that it was 'her .. research area [alone] to pursue' or that Watson/Crick stole her work.
Firstly, the physical measurements used by Crick (radius and pitch) were from Wilkins' work before Franklin joined the team. Those calculations did not assume a helix and were shared not stolen.
Secondly, Franklin never derived the math to fit a helix to her images. That had been done by Stokes (in her group) and Crick (independently). She refused to use these techniques until early 1953, long after 'Photo 51', and mocked Wilkins for insisting on trying them.
Crick inferred the 'antiparallel chains' from Franklin's non-helical work in the December 1952 progress report he viewed in February 1953. He had studied this exact relationship in his haemoglobin work. It is very likely that Franklin came to the same conclusion after returning to the helical model in March 1953 (C2 symmetry + helix => double helix) but it's unclear from her notes when she did so and if she did so independently.
She never disputed the priority, the MRC report was intended to be shared (it wasn't secret) and did not mention double helix, and Crick never claimed to have discovered the C2 symmetry himself. There's no allegation that Crick did not make the double helix inference independently. It's the only detail which could really be claimed to be stolen from Franklin in any way, and it would still be quite grey as Crick saw Franklin's work from months before she ever possibly made the conclusion.
Thirdly, the 'phosphates on the outside' was a discovery that Franklin had already gone public with before Watson and Crick were on the scene. Again, not stolen.
Lastly, Franklin never attempted to model if/how the bases would bond together in the internal structure of the strand. Her work didn't confirm or disprove that. Watson/Crick physically made models to test the plausibility of this detail - it wasn't informed by x-ray work. There was also non-x-ray work by other scientists informing their model.
This is not a case where she was running to the scientific society saying “double helix!” and they told her to get lost. She was sitting on evidence. We’ll never know how long it would have taken her to figure out its meaning, but we know Watson was first to recognize it out loud.
If any of you have time, I’ll tell you how I invented Twitter, Reddit, and AI assistants.
In the discussions about who figured out what when, a larger point is often overlooked: Does it really make sense to give credit to individuals for "discoveries" like the structure of DNA, when in fact they are always the product of collective inquiry? Yes, Watson and Crick made the final intuitive leap over the finish line. But that was only possible because of the many miles their colleagues (including Franklin) had already walked to put them in that position. So their breakthrough insight had more to do with them being in the right place at the right time in history than to any inherent brilliance.
> So their breakthrough insight had more to do with them being in the right place at the right time in history
No, that's just not correct. There were hundreds of people trying to get there and there were a ton of totally wrong theories with people trying to convince others to take them seriously. Not everyone was engaging in activity that could have ever solved the problem, very few were. Why do you think some scientists seem to have dozens or hundreds of major discoveries, but virtually all scientists have no major discoveries? Just luck? They steal them and don't get caught?
If there were hundreds of people trying to get there, and another got there before Watson and Crick, would they deserve fame and Watson and Crick the equivalent obscurity? Its not that Watson and Crick weren't brilliant and driven - it's that they were part of a larger collective movement that is undervalued. And I would argue that their contributions were dramatically overvalued partly because they were immersed in a culture which overvalues, and motivated them to overvalue, a very heroic "great man" narrative.
If they hadn't "discovered" the structure of DNA, how long do you think it would've been before someone else did?
I'm not making a 'great man' narrative. I'm just applying the Pareto Principle. 80% of research output will be by 20% of researchers. of that 80%, 80% will be by 20% of the 20%. so about 4% of researchers will be responsible for 64% of research output. This turns out to be surprisingly accurate.
It's not a 'great man' narrative, it's just the statement of long verified statistics.
I wonder if you find your position of "there are lots of smart people and success in research is mostly luck" attractive because you would like to believe you could have been a great researcher if you were more lucky?
The sad thing about this is that, despite this clarification, in schools, it'll still be taught as a Watson/Crick discovery, not Franklin, just as the telephone is still taught as a Bell invention rather than something he stole while working at the patent office and Edison gets credit for the light bulb even though he was a johnny-come-lately. Once these things are in print, it's hard to get them changed. I remember once in school being taught something (don't remember what it was) and sticking my hand up to say, "but that's not right. We now know X to be true." The teacher said, "But it's that way in the book, so that's how it'll be on your exams."
There's an awful lot or Franklin in print and the like, maybe more than she really deserves as it seems to have become the most famous story of alleged sex discrimination in science.
Bell didn’t steal the invention. There were many people working on it at the same time, but he and Watson were the first to actually a) patent it, and b) demonstrate it functionally.
Pedantic aside: the word "fortuitous" means "happened completely by chance", which is the opposite of what you seem to be implying here. You probably want a word like "incredible" or "unlikely" instead.
> Many object to the use of fortuitous to mean simply “fortunate” and insist that it should be limited to its original sense of “accidental.” In modern standard use, however, fortuitous almost always carries the senses both of accident or chance and luck or fortune. It is infrequently used in its sense of “accidental” without the suggestion of good luck, and even less frequently in the sense “lucky” without at least a suggestion of accident or chance
Attribution and glory-sharing is a tricky thing. The discovery was piecemeal and has a lot of names attached. For a lot of reasons, some her own, some the sexist institution she was part of, she did not publish first. Watson and Crick did. Even though they were privy to what she knew, and had seen Photo 51, and only briefly reference Wilkins/Franklin from KCL that gave them key insights... they published first.
I believe Franklin would have shared the Nobel prize with Watson and Crick had she not died before she could be nominated. The Nobel committee just don't offer posthumous prizes. That compounds the problem of Watson and KCL minimising her contribution. But if she had survived, I'm confident there would've been a huge dust-up as to whether she or Wilkins got third spot on the Nobel prize. As she was already dead before the DNA structure was confirmed, history couldn't go that way.
It's misattribution of causality. She wasn't nominated because she was dead and she suffered academic sexism, chauvinism and skullduggery, especially from Watson. It's not that she wasn't nominated because of academic sexism, chauvinism and skullduggery.
I read through these once. For those where I've been in the wrong, it's two patterns repeating. Either that I learned something in school / as a kid, and it was "correct" at the time but now we know better. Or that the common belief has just always been wrong.
Examples include that "glass is liquid", "bulls hate red", "touching a baby bird will make the mother abandon it", "you only taste salt on part X of your tongue" etc.
I've never believe that one. I have sometimes eaten a little bit of salt in the form of grains and it was completely obvious that I could taste the salt all over the top of the tongue.
I cannot for the life of me understand how anybody ever came to believe something like that.
It's not like modern people don't have plentiful access to cheap salt, sugar, citrus/lime juice, etc.
> "glass is liquid"
This one makes a lot more sense but the belief that old glass panes in windows are thicker at the bottom because glass is liquid rather than it being an obvious consequence of the manufacturing method -- blow a glass bubble and cut it up and flatten the pieces -- also seems insane to me. It's on the level of Americans believing rail gauges are derived from the width of Roman carts and refusing to accept that people used (and still use) many different rail gauges.
Arnold's principle (after Vladimir Arnold) says that no invention is attributed correctly to its true inventor. The principle applies to itself, of course.
Wilkins produced the initial samples, trained Gosling (who took photo 52) and then had his samples and assistant (Gosling) taken when the high flying Franklin was hired.
Yes, Franklin built a way better x-ray camera.
But she was also allegedly pretty horrid to Wilkins. She mocked Wilkins as a "middle class" idiot and apparently refused to share her data with him (Gosling did show Wilkins photo 52, which Gosling had taken, but PhD students don't get credit right?).
Franklin held a funeral for the double helix, because she thought he was an idiot to suggest DNA was a double helix.
Yeah, Wilkins was a little bit rude, giving as little credit to her as possible. But if some privileged upper-class rockstar moves into your lab, tries to freeze you out, mocks you for your theory, then you figure out you can prove your theory is correct (using a photo your former assistant took using the rockstar's camera) then yeah ... are you really going out of your way to praise them, even if maybe they could have eventually figure it out?
Wilkins was immediately convinced of helix from his earlier work; double helix was only arrived at later by Franklin (and Crick interpreting Franklin's work) because they were the only ones in this group who understood x-ray diffraction math. She mocked him after her own helix images were taken, because she believed the more complicated images of the A-DNA form (well beyond his skillset) held all the real secrets.
Wilkins is the one who seemed to get shafted the most in history. Franklin honestly seems like she barely did anything in the actual DNA discovery, and got all of the inferences wrong.
Franklin made the phosphates-on-the-outside discovery first. That was a detail the others got wrong. She also made the images good enough to see C2 symmetry in A-DNA, which was key to inferring double helix (though there was chemical evidence of this too), but she was late to developing that idea and got scooped.
Crick stands quite supreme in that drama though. The others could form supervillains, like Lex Luther. Would have been interesting to see Crick and Pauling as a team. Pauling would have figured out the structure with the whole dataset IMO. I think he did not have the full dataset that Crick and Watson had available, due to Wilkins. It may be more fair to name all five as discovers though, even if only Crick and Watson got the main credit.
Franklin and Wilkins weren't bad, they just didn't get on very well. Wilkins was a bit sensitive and Franklin was arrogant; but neither were really bad people. Wilkins later gave Franklin a lot more credit, he was just a bit peeved off at the time.
People do look a bit funny at Watson though ... he apparently became a bit of a crackpot in later years.
The fact is that after taking that image, she spent some 8+ months on a completely different research direction that yielded no results (A-DNA). She was not the first to take a picture showing helical structure (Wilkins' lab hired her after they had done this, and Pauling inferred helix from even earlier cruder images). She was the last person in the group to be convinced that A-DNA was also helical, and that it was time to start building molecular models. She is on the record mocking Wilkins for his non-specialist confidence in the simple helical structure, during the period she had Photo 51. She was yet to even attempt to model how base pairs (complimentary or otherwise) would fit together in the anti-parallel double helix phosphates-outside model she had by the time they published.
While it's fair to say that she contributed more than Watson/Crick (phosphates on the outside, precise helix and double helix measurements), and that her contributions were minimized at the time, she did not solve the DNA structure herself, and she certainly didn't do it alone. There are many others who made large contributions to this project and whose names are totally unknown to the average person. She was acknowledged by Watson/Crick and her work was published in the same issue of Nature - nobody could be unaware of her contributions. Watson later tried to rewrite history with himself at the center and was widely panned, even at the time.
Shifting reputational fortunes. He definitely had his issues but this modern geek caricature of him as some sort of opportunistic nasty is not justified by the historic record. The man contributed to human society, unquestionably.
Which is how we ended up with a famous electric car company named after Tesla, whereas Edison was far more involved with the type and contributed to battery technology for EVs of the day.
People seem to really simple, strong narratives. It used to be that Edison was a titanic genius who invented countless things solely through his own brilliance and hard work. Now he's some kind of scheming con man who did nothing but steal the work of others. Nuance is not popular.
I don’t know if it just depends on the state but I’m 29 years old and i learned the true inventors/scientists behind both of these in public school, and I went to school in NV which regularly scores near or at the bottom nationwide.
Slightly off topic, but I was initially confused by the image, since it looked like an X-shaped chromosome to me, rather than the orders of magnitude smaller DNA strand. This image explains the structure depicted in photo-51[0]
"But a new analysis of her notes on another x-ray image, which she made just days earlier using the same DNA sample, offers a firm rebuttal."
Watson may not have been the nicest scientist, but many people made wrong conclusions back then. Most famous is Linus Pauling's triple helix suggestion.
The article here makes it sound as if Watson and Crick failed completely
and were solely leeches on Franklin. Now you can state that there was a
mistreatment by Watson and Crick with regards to Franklin, but the article
suggests that she made the ground-breaking suggestions. But then why did she
not write an article earlier? Yes, you can say that the health was poor and
this may have delayed her analysis - but by the same token you can say the
article inflates her own contributions with regards to the dsDNA helix.
> Science historian Alistair Sponsel of the Science History Institute and crystallographer Brian Sutton of KCL argue Franklin knew the earlier photo had revealed a helix
That in itself was not an insight at all. See Pauling's triple helix. Conclusion
Pauling would have made the correct prediction eventually, he was a genius, but
at that time he failed (and if I recall correctly he did not have access to
Franklin's data, at the least I seem to remember that, e. g. Watson and Crack
had access to the data due to a third guy who was also near or on the campus site;
I don't rememeber where Pauling was, but he was probably not "in the close loop"
right there, at that time).
And, if I also recall correctly, the helix theory was already proposed before that.
I don't remember where I read it, so it could be wrong, but I think older scientific articles or books mentioned it or speculated about. At the least I am almost 100% certain that neither Franklin, Watson, Crick, Pauling etc... were the first to make such a proposal. Phoebus Levene made some suggestions too, even if wrong, you can see that people were getting closer to the puzzle and I think someone else too. But anyway, people will probably only remember Watson and Crick here and I think it is still deservedly so. Nobody says that these two were the only contributors ever.
> photograph 49, showing she made extensive notes about it despite a cosmetic defect. She recognized it suggested a helical structure and used it to calculate, for the first time, the length of each turn in the spiral—34 angstroms—and the number of bases “per turn of helix (if there is a helix).”
Ok, but you can make any local notes. These are not as useful as publishing a "it has not escaped our attention" article.
> No wonder Franklin recorded little in her notes about photograph 51, Sponsel and Sutton argue. She saw no need to repeat herself. Franklin “knows exactly what’s in front of her,” says Betty Smocovitis, a science historian at the University of Florida and co-editor of the Journal of the History of Biology.
No, I don't think so. If she would have had that as an insight, it
would have solved many things, just as Crick and Watson did reason about
in their own article. So perhaps she was slow. Or she did not figure out
the implication; it's difficult to say.
> The flawed image was good enough to reveal key details of the helix to Franklin. But she did not think it was good enough to publish.
You can find billion reasons as to why you don't want to publish. Whatever
the reasons, even if one thinks Crick and Watson were sneaky, she was slower.
It seems to me as if many do post-analysis from the point of view "everyone
was so unfair to her". That is understandable but that's not how science works.
> The reason, they say, is that Franklin was trying to understand different forms of the molecule before publishing
72 comments
[ 2.3 ms ] story [ 57.8 ms ] threadThat's the first actual evidence I've seen (I am a DNA nerd and have been trying to understand what her contribution to the intellectual discovery of DNA's double-helix antiparalel).
I would need to go back to Judson's book (Eighth Day of Creation) and see if he actually missed this.
As for base complementarity it seems likely that she would have made that leap from everything else that she knew of at the time, but I'm no expert on this subject and have not read her notes.
[0] https://youtu.be/_1FUqUSNPeI?t=2487
> It is easy to feel great sympathy with Franklin. The fact remains that she never made the inductive leap... before she learned about the model proposed by Watson and Crick, she and Gosling began to draft a paper to state their conclusions so far about the B structure. That draft also survived among Franklin’s papers. It was vigorous, clear, and limited. Klug and I went over it one afternoon in his office. “You see, she was lacking one final step,” Klug said. “Well, two steps. What she missed was the presence of the dyad—the symmetry of the molecule. Which Francis had seen immediately from her information about the space group. And even though her notes earlier showed that she knew about Chargaff’s ratios, she never got to the base pairing.”
Seems like Judson
It was Watson and Crick who discovered the double helix, even if Franklin did write something down about a single helix from a previous photo that they didn't read.
She might have measured those parameters, but she still didn't know what she had (as evidenced by how she subsequently spent a ton of time on Z-dna)
When I was studying spindle shaped viruses by electron microscopy we'd get beautiful fiber diffraction patterns in the fourier transform of the micrographs. I always wanted to try and solve the helical parameters but never got around to it.
The point of the article is to create the impression in the reader that Franklin did everything of any importance and was robbed of credit by the white men riding her coattails.
It will work.
Actually, of all of the characters involved, she was the only chemist. Watson was a biologist, Crick was a physicist, as was Wilkins. That's why Franklin was ultimately brought in: to make further progress, they needed a chemist with crystallography experience, and Franklin was the one who had that experience.
Helical DNA was the strongest candidate by 51, in part because earlier and cruder X-ray diffraction images had existed for some time (10+ years) and were suggestive of this structure. All of the scientists in question, and many others, collaborated on that possibility at that time, and long before 'Photo 51'. It was not a surprise, but rather the focus of their work.
Franklin was making the famous improved images with the explicit intent of revealing or disproving the helical structure. She and her lab produced the most definitive evidence for helical B-DNA (Photo 51) in early 52, but during 52 the conclusion was still a matter of debate (and humor) amongst them - in particular Franklin was not convinced that A-DNA was helical. From Wiki:
> In July 1952, as a practical joke on Wilkins (who frequently expressed his view that both forms of DNA were helical), Franklin and Gosling produced a funeral notice regretting the 'death' of helical A-DNA
This left the molecular structure and number of strands as open questions. Triple helix models had been attempted by Pauling, Watson and Crick at that time. Watson and Crick though were first to develop the successful double helix model with antiparallel base pairs in early 1953. It is likely that Franklin had also come to the conclusion that DNA was a double helix by this time (based on her draft notes + circumstantial evidence) but she did not do so in total isolation, nor did she did not complete the final molecular part of the puzzle (though she had worked on it).
TL;DR DNA structure was not a eureka moment spurred by a single breakthrough thought or piece of evidence; many scientists collaborated on eliminating various likely possibilities for years until the correct model was found.
Franklin was tackling the problem scientifically, with a view that you can only prove or disprove with empirical evidence, and publishing an unsupported model was unscientific. Watson was the tech bro, stealing data and coming up with an untested, unverified model. (Crick was mostly a nice guy hanging with the wrong crowd.)
The massive irony is that Franklin published her crystallographic photos and data in support of the Watson-Crick model, which had of course been derived from her images in the first place, without her knowledge.
The first images that Watson saw were actually taken before Franklin joined the team. Better images (and her analysis of them) were some of the most valuable pieces of evidence for narrowing down the possible structures (e.g. they disproved models by Pauling/Watson/Crick) - but by late 1952 Wilkins felt they had enough data and ought to focus on modelling. Franklin (who certainly had an ego of her own) insisted on continuing with her approach - she was an expert in these techniques after all and was making real progress.
Wilkins (who had been had been open with his own inconclusive results), eventually went over her head and showed the famous images to Watson and Crick. He felt they were sufficient to guide the model building and he was frustrated that Franklin had been withholding them while pursuing the wrong research directions. Franklin mocked him for his views at time, but Wilkins was somewhat vindicated.
I don't think this should be considered ironic, or that the image held all the answers, or that the discovery was stolen. Ultimately her work played exactly the role it was intended to, eliminating candidate models. The subsequent diminishment of that role is the real controversy, and most involved later walked back some of their statements.
If you don't think it's a little ironic to be publishing your xray diffraction patterns to support a model that was only conceived by illicitly viewing those unpublished xray diffraction patterns ... well, I don't know what to say. Perhaps gut-punch would be better than ironical? But Franklin never knew that Watson and Crick had viewed her results prior to forming their model, so she never realised just how much Wilkins had punched her in the gut.
Per Watson and Crick 1953: "We have also been stimulated by a knowledge of the general nature of the unpublished experimental results and ideas of Dr. M. H. F. Wilkins, Dr. R. E. Franklin and their co-workers at King’s College, London." Kinda putting it mildly there, don't you think?
Per Franklin and Gosling's back-to-back publication, 1953, after establishing the molecular features of DNA from their diffraction patterns: "Thus our general ideas are not inconsistent with the model proposed by Watson and Crick in the preceding communication."
Ouch. Well, yes, of course they were not inconsistent -- Watson and Crick took their dimensions exactly from Franklin and Gosling's work in the first place!
Yes, Franklin had an ego, but this was ultimately hers (and Gosling's) research area to pursue. Her approach of obtaining data to then build a model (the way we still do with structural biology!) is hardly something to dismiss. And, after all, there was an agreement that DNA structure would be worked on solely by the King's College group, and not by Watson and Crick at Cambridge. Franklin had no reason to assume that that was being broken, or that she didn't have the time to pursue the structure via a rigorous scientific pathway. Most people forget that the only supporting evidence that the Watson-Crick model was correct, and not simply another spurious model, was from Franklin and Gosling's paper in the same issue of Nature.
Firstly, the physical measurements used by Crick (radius and pitch) were from Wilkins' work before Franklin joined the team. Those calculations did not assume a helix and were shared not stolen.
Secondly, Franklin never derived the math to fit a helix to her images. That had been done by Stokes (in her group) and Crick (independently). She refused to use these techniques until early 1953, long after 'Photo 51', and mocked Wilkins for insisting on trying them.
Crick inferred the 'antiparallel chains' from Franklin's non-helical work in the December 1952 progress report he viewed in February 1953. He had studied this exact relationship in his haemoglobin work. It is very likely that Franklin came to the same conclusion after returning to the helical model in March 1953 (C2 symmetry + helix => double helix) but it's unclear from her notes when she did so and if she did so independently.
She never disputed the priority, the MRC report was intended to be shared (it wasn't secret) and did not mention double helix, and Crick never claimed to have discovered the C2 symmetry himself. There's no allegation that Crick did not make the double helix inference independently. It's the only detail which could really be claimed to be stolen from Franklin in any way, and it would still be quite grey as Crick saw Franklin's work from months before she ever possibly made the conclusion.
Thirdly, the 'phosphates on the outside' was a discovery that Franklin had already gone public with before Watson and Crick were on the scene. Again, not stolen.
Lastly, Franklin never attempted to model if/how the bases would bond together in the internal structure of the strand. Her work didn't confirm or disprove that. Watson/Crick physically made models to test the plausibility of this detail - it wasn't informed by x-ray work. There was also non-x-ray work by other scientists informing their model.
If any of you have time, I’ll tell you how I invented Twitter, Reddit, and AI assistants.
No, that's just not correct. There were hundreds of people trying to get there and there were a ton of totally wrong theories with people trying to convince others to take them seriously. Not everyone was engaging in activity that could have ever solved the problem, very few were. Why do you think some scientists seem to have dozens or hundreds of major discoveries, but virtually all scientists have no major discoveries? Just luck? They steal them and don't get caught?
I'm not making a 'great man' narrative. I'm just applying the Pareto Principle. 80% of research output will be by 20% of researchers. of that 80%, 80% will be by 20% of the 20%. so about 4% of researchers will be responsible for 64% of research output. This turns out to be surprisingly accurate.
It's not a 'great man' narrative, it's just the statement of long verified statistics.
I wonder if you find your position of "there are lots of smart people and success in research is mostly luck" attractive because you would like to believe you could have been a great researcher if you were more lucky?
Are you one of these people?
https://www.dictionary.com/browse/fortuitous
> Many object to the use of fortuitous to mean simply “fortunate” and insist that it should be limited to its original sense of “accidental.” In modern standard use, however, fortuitous almost always carries the senses both of accident or chance and luck or fortune. It is infrequently used in its sense of “accidental” without the suggestion of good luck, and even less frequently in the sense “lucky” without at least a suggestion of accident or chance
I believe Franklin would have shared the Nobel prize with Watson and Crick had she not died before she could be nominated. The Nobel committee just don't offer posthumous prizes. That compounds the problem of Watson and KCL minimising her contribution. But if she had survived, I'm confident there would've been a huge dust-up as to whether she or Wilkins got third spot on the Nobel prize. As she was already dead before the DNA structure was confirmed, history couldn't go that way.
It's misattribution of causality. She wasn't nominated because she was dead and she suffered academic sexism, chauvinism and skullduggery, especially from Watson. It's not that she wasn't nominated because of academic sexism, chauvinism and skullduggery.
I read through these once. For those where I've been in the wrong, it's two patterns repeating. Either that I learned something in school / as a kid, and it was "correct" at the time but now we know better. Or that the common belief has just always been wrong.
Examples include that "glass is liquid", "bulls hate red", "touching a baby bird will make the mother abandon it", "you only taste salt on part X of your tongue" etc.
I've never believe that one. I have sometimes eaten a little bit of salt in the form of grains and it was completely obvious that I could taste the salt all over the top of the tongue.
I cannot for the life of me understand how anybody ever came to believe something like that.
It's not like modern people don't have plentiful access to cheap salt, sugar, citrus/lime juice, etc.
> "glass is liquid"
This one makes a lot more sense but the belief that old glass panes in windows are thicker at the bottom because glass is liquid rather than it being an obvious consequence of the manufacturing method -- blow a glass bubble and cut it up and flatten the pieces -- also seems insane to me. It's on the level of Americans believing rail gauges are derived from the width of Roman carts and refusing to accept that people used (and still use) many different rail gauges.
Wilkins produced the initial samples, trained Gosling (who took photo 52) and then had his samples and assistant (Gosling) taken when the high flying Franklin was hired.
Yes, Franklin built a way better x-ray camera.
But she was also allegedly pretty horrid to Wilkins. She mocked Wilkins as a "middle class" idiot and apparently refused to share her data with him (Gosling did show Wilkins photo 52, which Gosling had taken, but PhD students don't get credit right?).
Franklin held a funeral for the double helix, because she thought he was an idiot to suggest DNA was a double helix.
Yeah, Wilkins was a little bit rude, giving as little credit to her as possible. But if some privileged upper-class rockstar moves into your lab, tries to freeze you out, mocks you for your theory, then you figure out you can prove your theory is correct (using a photo your former assistant took using the rockstar's camera) then yeah ... are you really going out of your way to praise them, even if maybe they could have eventually figure it out?
People do look a bit funny at Watson though ... he apparently became a bit of a crackpot in later years.
While it's fair to say that she contributed more than Watson/Crick (phosphates on the outside, precise helix and double helix measurements), and that her contributions were minimized at the time, she did not solve the DNA structure herself, and she certainly didn't do it alone. There are many others who made large contributions to this project and whose names are totally unknown to the average person. She was acknowledged by Watson/Crick and her work was published in the same issue of Nature - nobody could be unaware of her contributions. Watson later tried to rewrite history with himself at the center and was widely panned, even at the time.
Which is how we ended up with a famous electric car company named after Tesla, whereas Edison was far more involved with the type and contributed to battery technology for EVs of the day.
No it won't lol, it already isn't. Source: went to school. When there is a political will, there is a way
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photo_51#/media/File:60251254_...
https://youtu.be/voDVF7yjv80?is=z-DmO45CDjAhnjKP
Watson may not have been the nicest scientist, but many people made wrong conclusions back then. Most famous is Linus Pauling's triple helix suggestion.
https://scarc.library.oregonstate.edu/coll/pauling/dna/narra...
The article here makes it sound as if Watson and Crick failed completely and were solely leeches on Franklin. Now you can state that there was a mistreatment by Watson and Crick with regards to Franklin, but the article suggests that she made the ground-breaking suggestions. But then why did she not write an article earlier? Yes, you can say that the health was poor and this may have delayed her analysis - but by the same token you can say the article inflates her own contributions with regards to the dsDNA helix.
> Science historian Alistair Sponsel of the Science History Institute and crystallographer Brian Sutton of KCL argue Franklin knew the earlier photo had revealed a helix
That in itself was not an insight at all. See Pauling's triple helix. Conclusion Pauling would have made the correct prediction eventually, he was a genius, but at that time he failed (and if I recall correctly he did not have access to Franklin's data, at the least I seem to remember that, e. g. Watson and Crack had access to the data due to a third guy who was also near or on the campus site; I don't rememeber where Pauling was, but he was probably not "in the close loop" right there, at that time).
And, if I also recall correctly, the helix theory was already proposed before that. I don't remember where I read it, so it could be wrong, but I think older scientific articles or books mentioned it or speculated about. At the least I am almost 100% certain that neither Franklin, Watson, Crick, Pauling etc... were the first to make such a proposal. Phoebus Levene made some suggestions too, even if wrong, you can see that people were getting closer to the puzzle and I think someone else too. But anyway, people will probably only remember Watson and Crick here and I think it is still deservedly so. Nobody says that these two were the only contributors ever.
> photograph 49, showing she made extensive notes about it despite a cosmetic defect. She recognized it suggested a helical structure and used it to calculate, for the first time, the length of each turn in the spiral—34 angstroms—and the number of bases “per turn of helix (if there is a helix).”
Ok, but you can make any local notes. These are not as useful as publishing a "it has not escaped our attention" article.
> No wonder Franklin recorded little in her notes about photograph 51, Sponsel and Sutton argue. She saw no need to repeat herself. Franklin “knows exactly what’s in front of her,” says Betty Smocovitis, a science historian at the University of Florida and co-editor of the Journal of the History of Biology.
No, I don't think so. If she would have had that as an insight, it would have solved many things, just as Crick and Watson did reason about in their own article. So perhaps she was slow. Or she did not figure out the implication; it's difficult to say.
> The flawed image was good enough to reveal key details of the helix to Franklin. But she did not think it was good enough to publish.
You can find billion reasons as to why you don't want to publish. Whatever the reasons, even if one thinks Crick and Watson were sneaky, she was slower. It seems to me as if many do post-analysis from the point of view "everyone was so unfair to her". That is understandable but that's not how science works.
> The reason, they say, is that Franklin was trying to understand different forms of the molecule before publishing
Sorry, that...