Double Helix Double Cross? A Survey of Recent Articles

The observance this year of the 50th anniversary of the momentous discovery of the double helix structure of deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) has been marked by reflections on an alleged scientific injustice almost as much as by celebration of the great scientific achievement.

Was Rosalind Franklin (1920–58), the British scientist whose x-ray data on DNA played a crucial role in the discovery, denied proper credit for her contribution by codiscoverers James Watson and Francis Crick? A Nova television documentary, “Secret of Photo 51,” broadcast on PBS on April 22 (see www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/photo51), was the most recent account to suggest as much. But the truth of the matter may be more complicated.

Though feminists have turned her into “an icon for the oppression of women scientists,” observes Nicholas Wade, a science writer for The New York Times, there’s no evidence that Franklin herself—no shrinking violet, and known to object vigorously to unfair treatment—felt that she had been robbed by Watson and Crick. “She became friends with both men afterwards,” Wade writes in The Scientist (Apr. 7, 2003; see also www.the-scientist.com), “and spent her last convalescence in Crick’s house before her death, at age 37, from ovarian cancer.”

In their 1953 article in Nature announcing the discovery—which was accompanied by an article by Franklin telling what she knew about DNA—Watson and Crick, of the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge, England, said merely that they had been “stimulated by a knowledge of the general nature of the unpublished experimental results and ideas of Dr. M. F. Wilkins, Dr. R. E. Franklin, and their co-workers at King’s College, London.” When they accepted the 1962 Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine (which they shared with Maurice Wilkins, the deputy director of King’s College and Franklin’s colleague and rival there), Watson and Crick made no mention of Franklin. And in his best-selling book The Double Helix (1968), Watson portrayed her in condescending terms. Watson also noted that Wilkins, in highhanded fashion, had shown him Franklin’s x-ray photograph 51, without Franklin’s knowledge. Crick, meanwhile, obtained a King’s College report containing Franklin’s data. Watson and Crick’s model of the double helix soon followed.

“Given her temper, it is likely that Franklin would have been very angry if she had known the extent to which Watson and Crick used her data,” maintains Lynne Os­man Elkin, a professor of biological sciences at California State University, Hay­ward, writing in Physics Today (March 2003).

But did Franklin not know? In an article published a year after the famous 1953 article, Crick stated that “without [Franklin’s] data, the formulation of our structure would have been most unlikely, if not impossible.” Though they became friends, he and Frank­lin, according to Crick, never discussed the subject during the five years between the 1953 article and her death. Writes Wade: “It was probably obvious to Franklin, as Crick believes, that the structure rested on her data because no one else was producing any experimental results. And both knew that Crick had understood what Franklin’s data meant before she did.”

Franklin and the Watson-Crick team represented two contrasting approaches to doing science, observes Harvard University biologist R. C. Lewontin, writing in The New York Review of Books (May 1, 2003). “For Franklin, whom Watson characterizes as ‘obsessively professional,’ the evidence would finally speak for itself. . . . For Watson and Crick . . . data were useless without a prior concept. The facts could serve only to suggest a range of models and as a check against errors. They garnered their facts where they could.”

“We’re very famous because DNA is very famous,” Watson tells Scientific American (April 2003), referring to Crick and himself. “If Rosalind had talked to Francis starting in 1951, shared her data with him, she would have solved that structure. And then she would have been the famous one.” But 50 years after the discovery, with two biographies of her published and another in the works, Rosalind Franklin is now almost as famous as the Nobel laureates. In their great collective accomplishment, observes Lynne Osman Elkin, there’s “enough glory” to go around.