Was DNA pioneer Rosalind Franklin really a victim of scientific theft?

Rosalind Franklin must be seen as an equal contributor to fixing the construction of DNA, and never as a sufferer of theft, a pair of teachers argue in an article to mark the seventieth anniversary of Francis Crick and James Watson’s paper on the construction of DNA. They say an neglected letter and a draft journal article add to the proof that the favored view of Franklin’s position is incorrect.

“It deprives her of her agency,” says Matthew Cobb on the University of Manchester, UK. “That’s not right.”

According to many accounts, Franklin, a chemist at King’s College London, did all of the laborious work to elucidate DNA’s construction, however Crick and Watson on the University of Cambridge bought maintain of a key X-ray picture she took – Photograph 51 – by nefarious means, permitting them to publish the answer earlier than her. This concept derives from Watson’s 1968 ebook The Double Helix, but it surely isn’t true, says Cobb. Watson used Photo 51 as a dramatic gadget.

All the picture revealed is that DNA is helical, which was already identified. What’s extra, the picture was taken by Franklin’s graduate pupil Raymond Gosling, who shared it with Maurice Wilkins, the assistant director of the biophysics lab, along with her information. Wilkins then confirmed it to Watson.

More necessary to the invention than Photo 51 was a Medical Research Council (MRC) report that included a web page from Franklin on her work. This was given to Crick by his supervisor, Max Perutz. The knowledge on this MRC report didn’t reveal the construction to Crick and Watson, however was key to confirming their mannequin, says Cobb.

Cobb and Nathaniel Comfort, a historian of medication at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, have discovered a beforehand neglected 1953 letter to Crick by a researcher known as Pauline Cowan. It invitations Crick to a chat by Franklin and Gosling, however says that since Perutz already is aware of greater than is likely to be within the lecture, Franklin and Gosling assume it won’t be worthwhile for Crick to attend. The letter reveals that Franklin knew Perutz was sharing her findings with Crick and appeared wonderful with it.

“One of the reasons why they are so relaxed about this is that DNA was not the big deal it is now,” says Cobb. It solely later grew to become clear how necessary it’s.

Cobb and Comfort have additionally discovered a 1953 draft article for Time journal by Joan Bruce that by no means appeared in print.

Bruce portrays a collaborative effort. She writes that though Wilkins and Franklin labored independently from Crick and Watson, “they linked up, confirming each other’s work from time to time, or wrestling over a common problem”. It isn’t clear whose model of the story that is, however the truth that Bruce despatched the draft to Franklin for checking means that Franklin had talked or corresponded with Bruce.

Indeed, there is no such thing as a proof that Franklin herself felt laborious finished by. In June 1953, she exhibited a mannequin of DNA on the Royal Society in London, presenting the construction as a joint effort.

Franklin additionally grew to become pals with Crick and his spouse, spending time with them whereas in poor health with the most cancers that killed her in 1958. Between 1953 and her dying, she did groundbreaking work on viral construction that, by itself, may properly have received her a Nobel prize had she lived.

The letter and draft article aren’t that dramatic in themselves. Rather, they strengthen the case for an alternate model of historical past that others in addition to Cobb and Comfort have already put ahead.

In 2003, for example, Franklin’s biographer Brenda Maddox wrote in Nature that “the legend of Franklin, the wronged heroine” has “overshadowed her intellectual strength and independence both as a scientist and as an individual”. At the very least, Franklin’s story is extra complicated than the parable.