Rosalind Franklin: The Twisted Threads of Truth
When you pick up the memoir of a Nobel Prize-winning scientist detailing a groundbreaking discovery, you expect to be inspired. You anticipate admiration for the brilliance and perseverance of those involved. What you don’t expect is to finish the book with a deep sense of anger and resentment toward its author. Yet that’s exactly what happened when I read 'The Double Helix' by James Watson, his account of the discovery of DNA’s structure. Instead of inspiration, I was left with a heavy heart for Rosalind Franklin, who should have been known as a co-discoverer along with Maurice Wilkins, Watson, and Francis Crick.
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| Rosalind Franklin © Novartis Foundation |
Born on July 25, 1920, in Notting Hill, London, Rosalind Franklin grew up in an affluent Anglo-Jewish family that valued education for both men and women. A brilliant and independent child, she excelled at St. Paul’s Girls’ School, where she developed a strong passion for science. She went on to study chemistry at Newnham College, Cambridge, where she was known for her sharp intellect, high standards, and forthright nature. After earning her B.S., she conducted research on coal at the British Coal Utilisation Research Association, which led to her Ph.D. in physical chemistry in 1945.
After earning her Ph.D., Rosalind Franklin moved to Paris in 1947 to work at the Laboratoire Central des Services Chimiques de l’État, where she was among the few women in scientific research at the time. There, she became fascinated with X-ray crystallography, a technique used to determine the atomic structure of crystals, and her meticulous nature helped her master the complex process. In 1951, Maurice Wilkins, a scientist at King’s College London, learned of her expertise and invited her to join his research on DNA. Like many scientists of the time, he was racing to uncover its structure but had struggled to produce clear X-ray diffraction images that could provide meaningful data.
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| Franklin's famous Photo 51 (left) © Franklin, R. and Gosling, R.G./Nature and Memoir of J. D. Watson (right) © W&N |
I set out to write a biography of Rosalind Franklin, honoring her as she rightfully deserves. Wanting a deeper understanding of the DNA race, I picked up The Double Helix, expecting insight into the discovery. Instead, I was confronted with Watson’s unsettling portrayal of Franklin.
Reading Watson’s words was an infuriating experience. His blatant sexism made the book difficult to get through, forcing me to put it down multiple times. My heart pounded as I imagined the harassment Franklin endured and the constant battles she had to fight, not only to be acknowledged as a scientist in her own right but also to be recognized as an equal to her male peers.
He writes, “It was increasingly difficult to take Maurice’s mind off his assistant, Rosalind Franklin. Not that he was at all in love with Rosy, as we called her from a distance. Just the opposite—almost from the moment she arrived in Maurice’s lab, they began to upset each other. Maurice, a beginner in X-ray diffraction work, wanted some professional help and hoped that Rosy, a trained crystallographer, could speed up his research. Rosy, however, did not see the situation this way. She claimed that she had been given DNA for her own problem and would not think of herself as Maurice’s assistant.” Franklin was hired to lead DNA crystallography research at King’s College London, yet Wilkins assumed she was merely an assistant. This assumption—dismissing, undermining, and minimizing a woman’s expertise simply because she is a woman—is the very definition of gender harassment.
Watson’s commentary on Franklin doesn’t stop at professional undermining; it is laced with personal attacks that serve no purpose other than to diminish her. “By choice she did not emphasize her feminine qualities. Though her features were strong, she was not unattractive and might have been quite stunning had she taken even a mild interest in clothes. This she did not. There was never lipstick to contrast with her straight black hair, while at the age of thirty-one her dresses showed all the imagination of English bluestocking adolescents.” The sheer irrelevance of these remarks to Franklin’s scientific work is staggering. Instead of focusing on her brilliance, Watson reduces her to an object of male scrutiny, subtly suggesting that her worth should be tied to her appearance rather than her intellect.
Then comes one of the most chilling sentences in the book: “Clearly Rosy had to go or be put in her place.” The hostility in this statement is unmistakable. It suggests that Franklin’s real crime was not incompetence but defiance—the audacity to stand her ground in a male-dominated lab. I could only imagine the isolation she must have felt, the frustration of having to constantly prove herself in an environment that wanted her to submit rather than succeed.
Franklin was on the verge of solving the DNA puzzle. By late February 1953, she had already determined that DNA consisted of two chains, with phosphate groups on the outside—an insight that Watson and Crick would later confirm in their model. She also had the precise measurements of the DNA crystal’s unit cell, the smallest repeating structural unit of the molecule. More crucially, she and her student Raymond Gosling possessed the key piece of evidence: Photo 51. This X-ray-based fiber diffraction image, captured by Gosling, clearly revealed the helical structure of DNA. The image displayed the diffraction pattern of the “B” form of DNA, with alternating deoxyribose and phosphate molecules forming the backbone, and the base pairs, which encode proteins and thus govern inheritance, residing inside the helix.
Unbeknownst to Franklin, Watson and Crick had already gained access to Photo 51 through Wilkins, without her consent. Upon seeing the image, Watson immediately recognized its significance, recalling, "The instant I saw the picture, my mouth fell open, and my pulse began to race... The black cross of reflections... could only mean a helical structure." Armed with this crucial data, Watson and Crick constructed their famous double-helix model in early March 1953 at the Cavendish Laboratory. While their achievement was based on exceptional intellectual intuition and collaboration, it was also built upon Franklin’s unpublished work, which she had never shared with them knowingly and was never credited. When their model was published, Franklin’s contribution was relegated to little more than a footnote in the history of DNA’s discovery.
The irony is that Franklin had already prepared a manuscript summarizing her results, co-authored with Gosling, dated March 17, 1953—before Watson and Crick’s breakthrough reached King’s College. After learning of their model, she added a handwritten amendment to her paper, which was published in Nature on April 25, 1953. In it, she wrote, “Thus our general ideas are not inconsistent with the model proposed by Watson and Crick in the preceding communication.” This was true, as their model was ultimately based on her experimental data.
Rosalind Franklin’s contributions remained unrecognized in her lifetime. After leaving King’s, she dedicated herself to virus research, publishing 17 papers on the structure of TMV, four of which appeared in Nature. Though she took pride in her international reputation in the study of coals, carbons, and viruses, she never lived to see herself acknowledged for her role in DNA’s discovery. Tragically, before she could receive the recognition she deserved, Franklin fell seriously ill during a research trip to the U.S. Diagnosed with ovarian cancer, she fought the disease for a year before passing away on April 16, 1958, at the age of 37. Four years later, Watson, Crick, and Wilkins were awarded the 1962 Nobel Prize for their discovery of DNA’s structure and its role in heredity, while Franklin’s crucial contributions remained in the shadows. It was only long after her death that the world began to acknowledge her role in one of the greatest scientific discoveries of the 20th century.
Franklin’s story is a striking example of how gender harassment corrodes the integrity of science. A 2018 report by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine found that gender harassment—defined as demeaning, dismissing, or undermining women’s work simply because they are women—is the most common form of sexual harassment in STEM, yet it often receives less attention than more overt forms like sexual coercion or unwanted advances. The report also emphasizes that sexual harassment in any form damages not just individuals, but the credibility of science itself. Franklin’s exclusion from recognition is a testament to how discrimination has long skewed the historical record of scientific achievement.
Over the course of time, 'The Double Helix' did more than shed light on Franklin’s contributions—it laid bare the injustice she faced and the rampant sexism that still poisons the scientific community. Her unacknowledged contributions and the injustice she endured should propel us to confront and dismantle the systemic inequities still present in science today. Franklin’s legacy should not just be about what was stolen from her, but about ensuring that no scientist, regardless of gender, class, race, or caste, has to fight the same battles ever again.
Written by Janaky S. and edited by Parvathy Ramachandran @ThinkHer
References:
2.Franklin, R. E. & Gosling, R. G. Molecular configuration in sodium thymonucleate. Nature 171, 740–741 (1953).
3.https://www.science.org/content/article/rosalind-franklin-and-damage-gender-harassment
4.Maddox, B. The double helix and the 'wronged heroine'. Nature 421, 407–408 (2003)
5.https://newsroom.lmu.edu/administrative/sexism-in-science-was-rosalind-franklin-robbed-of-a-nobel-prize/
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