Taking Bearings

Highly Recommended Reading: What Rosalind Franklin truly contributed to the discovery of DNA’s structure. Nature. April, 2023. (see links to all articles mentioned herein in the comments section below)

Rosalind Franklin deserves more credit for her role as a collaborator in the discovery of the structure of DNA and her other profound and foundational contributions to molecular biology, but she wasn’t the victim many have asserted, nor were the Nobel winners James Watson, Francis Crick, and Maurice Wilkens the sexist intellectual property thieves some have asserted over the years.

Rosalind Franklin deserves much more credit than she has formally received for her integral contributions to the revolutionary discovery of the structure of DNA in the 1950s. Moreover, her broader contributions to molecular biology place her in any pantheon of science or scientists.

As revealed in a paper published this month in Nature, however, recent reviews of Franklin’s notes provide persuasive evidence that prior contentions that James Watson and Francis Crick “stole” her work, or that she had the both the structure and molecular mechanism of DNA worked out before Watson and Crick published their model are false.

Watson and Francis Crick’s seminal paper detailing the discovery of the DNA double helix, was published as part of a trio of papers (one authored by Franklin) in Nature 70 years ago this month. [1] [2] [3]

Watson and Crick’s breakthrough was the intellectual culmination of many past discoveries in molecular genetics, and included the work of Franklin. While the recent discoveries show Franklin’s uncertainties over the correct double helix structure for DNA (and her lack of work on a functional model) they also reveal how integral and essential Franklin’s work was to the articulation of the structure of DNA and the confirmation of the Watson and Crick model.

Without Franklin’s work, it is quite probable that U.S. scientist Linus Pauling would have won the race to publish the correct double helical structure of DNA. (Pauling was close, having a paper in which he proposed a triple helix structure for DNA).

For many years it has been fashionable in some circles to hold Franklin out as simply a victim of sexism. Sexism is real, of course, including sexism in science but without sufficient context, opportunities are also lost to explore the many facets of sexism that help us all recognize and mitigate its manifestations. Moreover, it masks that Franklin, who was Jewish, was also troubled by antisemitism.

The recent papers in Nature also confirm what I argued in 2015 and what I have written over the years into my own writings on the discovery of DNA

As I wrote in 2015 [4], 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 (who worked at Cambridge) 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 than stealing Franklin’s work. Watson and Crick went beyond the elucidation of DNA structure.

Their 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. The recent work reveals that Watson seeing “photograph 51” wasn’t, however, the eureka moment Watson later claimed but rather a key piece of evidence that the model they were building was correct. In fact, it was other data from Franklin and Wilkins that proved equally crucial to confirming the Watson and Crick model, and that such data wasn’t, as suggested by some over the years, acquired surreptitiously or dishonestly. The new findings show Franklin was cooperative in sharing her data.

Between Johann Miescher’s isolation of DNA in the 1870s and the 1962 Nobel Prize shared by Watson, Crick, and Maurice Wilkins, in addition to the work of Franklin, there were many intermediate steps and contributions to the Watson and Crick model.

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 own x-ray crystallography work showed that some proteins had helical shapes.

Rosalind Franklin was also an extraordinarily gifted scientist and skilled x-ray crystallographer. She received her doctorate from Cambridge in 1945, and worked on multiple projects while with the Laboratoire Central des Services Chimique de L’Etat in Paris. In 1951, she went to King’s College, London, to study the crystalline structure of DNA with Wilkins.

While Franklin may have had a hypothesis about the double helical model of DNA structure, she could not confirm it. In fact, early in 1953 she expressed uncertainly about the double helix model.

Watson and Crick had nothing to do with Franklin ‘s rejection in early 1953 of the helical structure for DNA. Franklin’s own note show she rejected modeling the data — the very exercise that allowed Watson and Crick to make the leap from structure to mechanism of function.

Publishing in Nature in April 2023, the authors of a review of Franklin’s work argued, “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.” [5]

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 the Watson and Crock model fit. Moreover, and equally as important to their Nobel Prize citations, the model provided a biophysical basis for replication, transcription and translation that now sit at the core of modern molecular biology.

It is also important to note that while Watson and Crick may not have given Franklin sufficient credit in their April 1953 paper, less than a year later – and many years before the Nobel prize was awarded — they published a more detailed model, that openly acknowledged “the formulation of our structure would have been most unlikely, if not impossible ” without Dr. Franklin’s data and other work done at King’s College).

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.

Over the history of science 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. In some extreme cases, women were 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.

Scientists across a number of disciplines, for example, claim the work of other women scientists merited at least a share of a Nobel Prize, 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 Nobel trust or terms of the prize could be altered to award Dr. Franklin, I would strongly support that effort.

I have been studying molecular biology for close to 50 years. In all that time I have never had a professor or colleague fail to laud the importance of Franklin’s work and contributions. In fact, they were always careful to point out that Franklin’s work might have put her in the running for several Nobel Prizes. Franklin’s later work helped revealed the structure of tobacco mosaic virus and she did seminal research on the polio virus.

No serious historian of science has, however, ever argued that Franklin was MORE deserving of the Prize than Watson, Crick, or Wilkens.

In all of my own 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.

When Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier deservedly won the 2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for their pioneering work with CRISPR gene editing, a technology that has also revolutionized molecular biology. Many claimed that the exclusion of Feng Zhang from a share of the prize was in some way retribution for Franklin not receiving her fair share of acclaim for her work. Many thought Zhang’s omission was simply ugly politics and a stain on this prize

While prize awards may inequities that can’t be rectified, history does not need to be a zero-sum game. We do not need to reflexively reduce the contributions of others in order to elevate the contribution of those previously marginalized.

Where there is a will –quite literally in the case of Alfred Nobel – there is a way.

As I wrote in 2015, “Without having to bestow cash awards, it would cost the Nobel Prize committees nothing to revisit history and more fully honor women and others who were overlooked because they died or — more commonly– had contributions minimized because they were women or belonged to other marginalized groups in science. Such a move would not only partially rectify past historical wrongs, but also go a long way to providing a more comprehensive and diverse pantheon of great scientists to inspire future generations.”

Such a move would not only partially rectify past historical wrongs, but also go a long way to providing a more comprehensive and diverse pantheon of great scientists to inspire future generations.

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[1] Watson J. D. and Crick F. H. C. “A Structure for Deoxyribose Nucleic Acid.” Nature 171, 737–738 (1953)

[2] Wilkins M. H. F., Stokes A. R. & Wilson H. R. “Molecular Structure of Deoxypentose Nucleic Acids.” Nature 171, 738–740 (1953).

[3] Franklin R. and Gosling R. G. “Molecular Configuration in Sodium Thymonucleate.” Nature 171, 740–741 (1953).

[4] K. Lee Lerner. “Rosalind Franklin deserves more credit for her role as a collaborator in the discovery of the structure of DNA, but she wasn’t the victim many assume.” Taking Bearings Harvard Blogs. October. 2015. Available at https://blogs.harvard.edu/kleelerner/rosalind-franklin/

[5] Matthew Cobb and Nathaniel Comfort. “What Rosalind Franklin truly contributed to the discovery of DNA’s structure. “Nature April 25, 2023. Available online at: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-01313-5