Rocky Road: Rosalind Franklin

Rosalind Franklin

By choice she did not emphasize her feminine qualities. . . . 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 blue-stocking adolescents. So it was quite easy to imagine her the product of an unsatisfied mother who unduly stressed the desirability of professional careers that could save bright girls from marriages to dull men. . . . Clearly Rosy had to go or be put in her place. The former was obviously preferable because, given her belligerent moods, it would be very difficult for Maurice [Wilkins] to maintain a dominant position that would allow him to think unhindered about DNA. . . . The thought could not be avoided that the best home for a feminist was in another person's lab.

Ten years after Rosalind Franklin's death, James Watson described her thus in his best-selling book The Double Helix. When a friend of Franklin's tried to console her mother that at least Franklin would always be remembered, her mother's answer was, "I would rather she were forgotten than remembered in this way."

From Rosalind Franklin: The Dark Lady of DNA by Brenda Maddox

Watson's account omitted the fact that Franklin later became his friend, and — much more significantly — that without an unauthorized peek at her unpublished data, he and Francis Crick probably would neither have published their famous paper on the structure of DNA in 1953, nor won their Nobel Prizes in 1962. Franklin did not share the Nobel Prize; she died in 1958 at the age of 37.

Franklin was born to an affluent Jewish family that strove for centuries to become more English than the English themselves. Described as an "alarmingly clever" girl, she amused herself with math problems and vowed to become a scientist. She won a scholarship to Cambridge, though her family refused the money and paid her tuition with its own funds. After completing her Ph.D., she did post-doctoral work in France and specialized in X-ray crystallography of carbonaceous solids. She eventually returned to England and took a position at King's College London. It was there that she took X-ray diffraction photographs of DNA strands that uncovered DNA's double-helical structure.

Franklin's 27 months at King's were among the least happy of her life. She missed France and despised the men's-club atmosphere that even forbade her to eat in the same dining room as her male colleagues. She butted heads especially with senior researcher Maurice Wilkins. In fact, Wilkins and Franklin were both misled (maybe out of sheer carelessness) by J.T. Randall, director of King's Biophysics Unit. Randall sent Franklin a letter telling her that she would be in charge of DNA research, all the while allowing Wilkins to think that DNA would remain his territory and that Franklin would assist him. Communication between Franklin and Wilkins all but disappeared, and Wilkins didn't learn of Randall's letter to Franklin until years after her death.

Perhaps to his later regret, Wilkins eventually showed one of Franklin's unpublished DNA photographs (the now-famous "Photograph 51") to Watson and Crick of the Cavendish. Wilkins hoped to publish with Watson and Crick, but after seeing the DNA photograph, they scooped him as well as Franklin. They published their paper shortly afterwards with scant acknowledgment to Franklin or her assistant, Raymond Gosling. Even Crick — who became a close friend of Franklin's before she died — remarked in the late 1970s, "First-class scientists take risks. Rosalind, it seems to me, was too cautious." Yet some scientists familiar with the situation suspected that Franklin would have found the structure of DNA on her own in several more weeks. She had already authored a paper acknowledging the likelihood of a helical structure for DNA by the time she learned of Watson and Crick's model. Had she known what Wilkins did, she might have been livid. Or she might not. As it was, Franklin didn't realize there was any race to publish the structure of DNA, and she was simply happy to be leaving King's for the friendlier environment of J.D. Bernal's lab at Birkbeck College. There she did pioneering work with the tobacco mosaic virus and started studying polio. Watson and Crick, meanwhile, had to wait years before the significance of their study struck a note with the public.

Franklin's friends and family pointed out that Watson didn't know her well, or chose to ignore much of what he did know when he wrote The Double Helix. In fact, she was known for her fashion sense and vivacious personality — in the right circles. And contrary to what Watson's book implied, she was perfectly capable of interpreting her DNA photographs, not just taking them. Yet Franklin was no saint. She had a short temper, she often seemed unfriendly to those who didn't know her, and her affluent background may have affected her opinions of her less-wealthy colleagues more than she realized.

In Franklin's day, photographing DNA could take up to 100 hours of radiation exposure, and in the years she worked with X-ray equipment, she rarely took precautions to protect herself from radiation. In fact, few scientists at the time did, but Franklin was especially unlucky. From excessive radiation or other causes, she developed ovarian cancer in her mid-30s. Of all the players in the discovery of DNA, she alone was unable to defend herself from Watson's portrayal, which wasn't particularly kind to anyone. In a perverse sense, however, Watson did Franklin a favor with his "Rosy" caricature; had he not painted Franklin as a witch, she might have been more easily forgotten. As it turned out, Watson timed his little book rather unwisely; when he published it, in 1968, the feminist movement was well underway, and Franklin became an icon. (To be fair, Watson later admitted that, had she lived, Franklin might well have received her own Nobel Prize, perhaps sharing the Chemistry Award with Wilkins.) Yet there was more to her life than her work at King's. In her short life, she authored or co-authored 37 scientific papers, and besides her contribution to the study of DNA, she won international respect for her work on carbonaceous solids and virology.

For more information:
Rosalind Franklin: The Dark Lady of DNA by Brenda Maddox
50 Years of DNA edited by Clayton and Dennis
The Double Helix James D. Watson
DNA: The Secret of Life by James D. Watson
A Bedside Nature edited by Walter Gratzer
Francis Crick: Discover of the Genetic Code by Matt Ridley
Making Modern Science by Bowler and Morus
Gregor Mendel by Simon Mawer