Did Rosalind Franklin Really Co-Discover DNA?
Efforts to rewrite the history are really telling.
There’s been a concerted effort to make DNA good for the Jews.
I’ve written about this already as it concerns the Holocaust and family reunification efforts and I’m broadly sympathetic.
I suspect that there will be some nations and some peoples that elect to sequence every member. Because I believe DNA is good for everyone I applaud of this effort.
Still there are those who insist on the historical record having some semblance to reality. Among them are those who work with me.
My colleague Gavan Tredoux writes in detail:
In evaluating Franklin’s role in the discovery of the double-helix structure of DNA, it is useful to carefully state the different claims that might be made.
Rosalind Franklin discovered at least part of the structure of DNA.
Rosalind Franklin did not discover the structure herself but could have.
Rosalind Franklin did not discover the structure herself but would have.
Claim 1 is certainly false. She discovered no part of the structure of DNA. She produced some skillful painstaking photographs. Neither Watson not Crick relied on her interpretation of those photographs. All they needed were the photographs and ran with them. Her private speculations in her notebooks after that are not especially relevant. Speculations which fell well short of the mark.
Claim 2 is imponderable. Who can say? Almost anything is possible. Linus Pauling and many others could have discovered the structure too, but they too did not. Certainly Watson and Crick were a much stronger team and always more likely to do so, with Crick’s mathematical skills rare and valuable. Franklin probably needed a collaborator to supply complementary skills that she lacked, but she was temperamently unsuited to that sort of thing.
Claim 3 is certainly false. She would not have. At the very least she was already beaten to it. Moreover Franklin had abandoned the field because of her squabbles with Wilkins and dislike for the King’s College setup. If Watson and Crick had not already solved the puzzle, it would not have been solved by her without another career change and yet more imponderable events.
Why then has so much been made of Franklin, given that she was no more than a skilled technician in this process? It was a slow development, starting in the 1970s with her first biographer, her friend Anne Sayre, whose insubstantial Rosalind Franklin and DNA (1975) catalyzed the process of reinvention. Brenda Maddox—notable for writing almost exclusively about women, even to the extent of writing a biography of Nora Barnacle rather than that insignificant fellow she eventually married, James Joyce—followed with Rosalind Franklin: The Dark Lady of DNA (2002). But Maddox was unembarrassed by any technical knowledge of the field. Now the tumbling has become an avalanche, and each year brings forth more of these productions. Even Chelsea Clinton has, it seems, entered the lists (you will have to locate and read that on your own). Some have also argued that Franklin should have shared the Nobel prize with Watson, Crick and Wilkins, apparently unaware that the Nobel is never awarded posthumously.
We won’t even go there with Francis Crick’s alleged homosexuality though I welcome his posthumous outing!
Not that there’s anything wrong with that!
It’s okay to be gay. Why it might even be genetic to be gay…