Taking Bearings

Taking Bearings [Column]
K. Lee Lerner

Dear Mighty Girl,

I’m a big fan and your site is important, but I’m distressed over a facet of your recent post about Rosalind Franklin. Specificaly, your blatant conclusion —and the comments it fueled — that “Franklin’s story remains one of the most famous and egregious examples of a female scientist being denied credit for her work due to sexism.” https://www.facebook.com/…/a.360833…/918718764831104/….

Sexism is real, including sexism in science and science history. What pains me most about article —and the naked charge of sexism — is that when terms like sexism are used, especially directed at young women, without sufficient exploration, the term begins to lose power and meaning. Opportunities are also lost to explore th many facets of sexism that help us all recognize and mitigate its manifestation.

Watson and Crick’s breakthrough was the intellectual culmination of many past discoveries in molecular genetics, and included the work of Dr. Rosalind Franklin, but to say they stole or plagiarized her discovery (see comments section) is misleading and/or absolutely false.

The article itself is objective, accurate, and fair until its blatant conclusion and charge of sexism. The story is, however, much more nuanced — and that unexplored charge only fuels hatred as evidenced by the unwarranted vitriol in the comments section.

When they published their model of DNA in Nature’s April 1953 issue (Dr. Franklin also published a paper on the structure of DNA in the same issue). Watson and Crick did mention Dr. Franklin. They wrote, “We have also been stimulated by a knowledge of the general nature of the unpublished results of Dr M H F Wilkins, Dr R E Franklin and their co-workers at King’s College, London.”

Did they give her adequate credit for her contributions? To their shame, I think not, but this is a far different offense that what they are speciously accused of in the comments to this post.

The Nobel was awarded for “discoveries concerning the molecular structure of nucleic acids AND its significance for information transfer in living material” and it’s that last bit that was uniquely Watson and Crick’s contribution –they made the link between DNA’s structure and the molecular basis for how the genetic code works.
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It was Wilkins who showed Franklin’s famous “photograph 51” to Watson. With Franklin’s photo (also with help for data from a report authored by Franklin in 1952) to help guide them, Watson and Crick constructed a model also built on decades of other intermediate discoveries by other scientists.

Between Johann Miescher’s isolation of DNA in the 1870s and the 1962 Nobel Prize shared by Watson, Crick, and Maurice Wilkins there were many intermediate contributions, including the work of Dr. Franklin. Working with crystallographer John Bernal, William Astbury used x-ray diffraction to determine crystalline structures and attempted to build a DNA model to see how its sugar and phosphate might fit. Erwin Chargaff at Columbia University critically determined that in DNA, the proportions of adenine (A) and thymine (T) were almost the same as those of cytosine (C) and guanine (G). Linus Pauling’s discovered that the molecules of some proteins have helical shapes. Rosalind Franklin was also an x-ray crystallographer. She received her doctorate from Cambridge in 1945, and worked on multiple while with the Laboratoire Central des Services Chimique de L’Etat in Paris. In 1951, went to King’s College, London, to study the crystalline structure of DNA with Wilkins. While Franklin was developing her own model of DNA structure, she could not confirm it.

Ultimately and critically, it was Crick who realized, as Franklin did not, that DNA consisted of two helical chains running parallel to each other but in opposite directions. With that insight their model worked, and provided a biophysical basis for replication, transcription and translation that sit at the core of modern molecular biology.

Years before the Nobel prize was awarded, both Watson and Crick openly acknowledged that building their DNA model “would have been most unlikely, if not impossible” without Dr. Franklin’s photos (and other work done at King’s College). No serious historian of science has, however, advanced that Franklin was MORE deserving of the Prize than Watson, Crick, or Wilkens.

Franklin technically did not win the prize because, by charter, no more than three recipients can share a Nobel, and none are awarded posthumously. Like Marie Curie, Franklin’s work exposed her to high doses of radiation before its dangers were fully known and she died at age 37 of ovarian cancer in 1958, four years prior to the Nobel Prize was awarded to Watson, Crick, and Wilkens

There is ample evidence that sexism — and other prejudices based on race, ethnicity, and politics — certainly conspired to deny women due consideration in science. In some cases, men have been given sole credit for significant discoveries at least partly made by women, and in extreme cases women have been written out of textbooks. The “Matilda Effect” (denial/repression of contributions of women) is still an issue with which historians of science and modern academic tenure committees still grapple.

Other deserving women have also been denied a Nobel, including, but not limited to, Nettie Stevens (sex determination by chromosomes); Lise Meitner (physics of nuclear fission); Chien-Shiung Wu (physics related to disproving mirror image parity in subatomic particles); Ester Lederberg (microbiology advances and bacteriophage discoveries); and Jocelyn Bell Burnell (pulsars). .

If the terms of the prize could be altered to award Dr. Franklin, I would strongly support that effort. In fact, Franklin’s work might have put her in the running for several Nobel Prizes. Franklin’s later work revealed the structure of tobacco mosaic virus, the first virus to be discovered and she did pioneered research on the polio virus. Failing that, in all of my lectures, and across writing and editing in many books, I have tried to ensure that Dr. Franklin gains the credit and respect she deserves, not by denigrating the legitimate work and contributions of others, but by writing a richer and more inclusive history that more completely tells the story of the discovery of the structure of DNA and other advances in science.

Respectfully,
K. Lee Lerner,

Editor, Scientific Thought: In Context and Advisory Board Member of American Men and Women of Science. http://scholar.harvard.edu/…/publica…/scientific-thought

Scientific Thought
Lerner BW, Lerner KL. Scientific Thought. (Lerner BW, Lerner KL). Cengage | Gale; 2010.
SCHOLAR.HARVARD.EDU