Nobel laureates Watson and Crick misbehaved less than expected

She was very smart and a real genius, but Rosalind Franklin (1920-1958) had a hard time in the scientific world in the 1950s. While she was working on experiments that would change the world, a co-worker thought it was a shame she didn’t wear lipstick and didn’t pay much attention to her haircut. But when the same colleague saw her best work without permission, she gave him a eureka moment–an insight so important that it would win him the Nobel Prize along with two other men. The misogynistic scientific world did not give Franklin such an award, although her work was of decisive importance.

For example, one oft-told stories tells of one of the great scientific discoveries of the twentieth century, the discovery of the structure of DNA in 1953. It was fellow misogynist James Watson, who, with Francis Crick, built a valid model of a molecule containing genetic information. And necessary for life. The two shared the 1962 Nobel Prize with Maurice Wilkins, who worked in the same laboratory as Franklin.

But the story is wrong, zoologist Matthew Cobb and medical historian Nathaniel Comfort write in this article nature. Both authors are working on biographies of Crick and Watson respectively and have reviewed sources on Franklin together.

These include Picture 51, an image Franklin made of a DNA molecule by pointing X-rays at it. It’s called X-ray crystallography, and Franklin was really good at it. This technique has been used for DNA research. Its existence was already proven in the 19th century and around 1950 it became increasingly clear that the material contained genetic information. But how the DNA was assembled and how it works is still unknown. Many researchers hoped to find out: Franklin and Wilkins used X-ray crystallography, Watson and Crick by making models that should match the empirical research of others.

Despite its “Photo 51” name, Franklin did not produce photographs, but rather images that only professionals can interpret. Picture 51 was a particularly successful copy. So successful—as the old story goes—that the photograph showed a sneaky-looking Watson in one fell swoop how the molecule was put together: It consisted of two connected threads, which were wound around each other like a screw thread. This insight would have been crucial for him and Crick, who could then build various models of the double screw thread until one matched all the knowledge from the previous research.

In fact, Cobb and Comfort write, Watson wasn’t secretly watching the photo. A letter from Franklin’s archives explains that she knew her colleague Wilkins, later a third Nobel Prize laureate, was sharing information with the other two men. And she didn’t seem to mind.

More importantly, Watson’s eureka moment never happened. After all, it is impossible to tell what a DNA molecule looks like from photo 51. The photo allows for multiple interpretations. Otherwise, Cope and Comfort suspected, expert Franklin would have familiarized himself with the structure of the double helix.

Mystifyingly, Watson himself wrote that Picture 51 played this major role. He did it in a book about events, double helix (1968). But in fact, there is much wrong with the book, and a careful reading of various sources shows that the two men obtained far more important information than Franklin around the same time. He was somewhat technical, and was interested, among other things, in the type of symmetry of DNA strands. For Watson and Crick, this data was valuable. Not because they made it clear all at once, but because they were one of many steps toward eventual discovery. Because research is rarely done in leaps and bounds and usually in many small steps.

Various scientists, including Franklin, have contributed a variety of ideas, particularly about parts of a molecule. For example, there were clearly four “major building blocks” which, after the initial letters of the typical materials, were designated A, T, G, and C. In addition, it was suspected that these components had been in circulation for some time in order in a spiral structure. But it was not clear whether they contained two or three helices and how the parts were arranged within them.

This is where Watson and Crick take an important step. They built a two-fold model, in which the four building blocks are arranged in a special way. If one weft has an A, the adjacent strand always has a T of the same height, and vice versa. And always G and C together. This model was consistent with information gathered by researchers such as Franklin and Wilkins and many of their predecessors.

They wrote in 1954 that Watson and Crick would not have made it this far without Franklin’s work Proceedings of the Royal Society. But in later stories, like Watsons double helixthey pushed Franklin to the background and she turned into a woman who did not even understand the importance of her image 51.

In the 1970s, feminist historiography laid the groundwork for another version of the story, the one that opens this article, in which Franklin was the victim of sexism for the theft of knowledge. There was some truth to this, because as a woman, Franklin received less support and praise from her male colleagues, who really judged her hair care and lack of lipstick. But her ideas weren’t stolen and her #51 photo, no matter how clever, wasn’t the key to the structure of her DNA.