New Delhi: It is a story often told and retold in scientific lore, a story of denial, yet also of inspiration, the story of Rosalind Franklin. The iconic British scientist’s work, some of it shared without her knowledge, helped James Watson and Francis Crick establish the double-helix structure of DNA — and they walked away with all the credit. Watson and Crick won the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1962, jointly with Maurice Wilkins, Franklin’s former colleague. Franklin didn’t share the podium; she had died of ovarian cancer four years previously, at age 37.
Now, 70 years after Watson and Crick published their seminal results in Nature, two researchers have sought to revisit the narrative that presents Franklin as a victim. In a comment article in the same journal, zoologist Matthew Cobb and medical historian Nathaniel Comfort argue that far from being a victim, Franklin was an equal contributor to the effort that went into the discovery of DNA structure.
Some things need to be viewed in perspective here. Cobb is writing Crick’s biography and Comfort is separately writing Watson’s. While they acknowledge and describe the exact details of Franklin’s contribution, they write that Watson and Crick solved the puzzle through their own efforts, and that they used data from Franklin and others (without permission) to confirm their findings.
Photograph 51 & Watson’s book
At the heart of the popular narrative is Photograph 51, an X-ray image taken at King’s College London in 1952 by Franklin and her graduate student Raymond Gosling. Wilkins too was at King’s then, while Watson and Crick were with the University of Cambridge.
Photograph 51 displays the way X-rays are scattered off a pure fibre of DNA. The name is as iconic as the image itself. Photograph 51 is the title of a play written by Franklin’s friend Anna Ziegler; Nicole Kidman played the role of Franklin in a 2015 staging of the play at London’s West End.
In 1953, when Franklin was preparing to leave King’s College to pursue other research elsewhere, Wilkins showed Photograph 51 to Watson, who was visiting King’s. This happened without Franklin’s knowledge. The narrative is that this was the eureka moment that led to Watson and Crick deciphering DNA structure in the end.
And it was propagated by Watson himself. In his 1968 bestseller, The Double Helix, Watson claims that the image showed that a DNA helix “must exist” — only a helical structure could produce those marks.
Cobb and Comfort find this claim problematic. “It implies that Franklin, the skilled chemist, could not understand her own data, whereas he, a crystallographic novice, apprehended it immediately. Moreover, everyone, even Watson, knew it was impossible to deduce any precise structure from a single photograph…”
They argue that Watson’s claim was merely a literary device: “a eureka moment, easy for lay readers to understand”. And this, in turn, gave rise to the narrative of Franklin having been wronged. The fact is that with or without the image, she was already recognised for her work.
“Franklin was widely recognised as a virtuosic crystallographer and to date, we have seen no sign or mention of Franklin being wronged until Watson wrote The Double Helix. It is difficult to underestimate the power Watson’s book has exerted on this story. It cannot be taken at face value,” Comfort said in an email. He described Photograph 51 as a red herring, planted by Watson.
Watson’s book has faced criticism for another reason: His disparagingly sexist remarks about Franklin, including about the way she dressed.
What they took from her
While arguing that Photograph 51 played a lesser role than Watson suggested, Cobb and Comfort write of other data from Franklin that Watson and Crick used. But here too, they argue, the data was only used to confirm what the two scientists had worked out independently.
Crick had obtained a copy of a 1952 report of the activity of the Medical Research Council of King’s, including contributions by Franklin. They argue, however, that the data was not stolen. They cite a January 1953 letter to Crick from a King’s researcher, Pauline Cowan, and interpret its contents as suggesting that Franklin “seems to have assumed that Perutz (Crick’s supervisor) would share his knowledge with Crick as part of the usual informal scientific exchange”.
Watson and Crick eventually deduced the structure of DNA with “trial and error” — making chemical calculations and fiddling about with cardboard models. Once they had hit on a conceptual model of the structure, the King’s report provided a valuable check on their assumption, Cobb and Comfort write.
“So it was not a case of them stealing the King’s group’s data and then, voila, those data gave them the structure of DNA. Instead, they solved the structure through their own iterative approach and then used the King’s data — without permission — to confirm it,” they write.
What was acknowledged
In April 1953, Nature published three back-to-back papers by Franklin and Gosling, Watson and Crick, and Wilkins and his co-workers. Apart from underlining the fact that Franklin’s work was already acknowledged then, the papers also marked the differences in their approach. While Watson and Crick would eventually get their result through calculations, Franklin’s work was based on experiments and observations.
“The Watson and Crick paper is a hypothetical model of DNA structure. It contains no data. The other papers are experimental, based on observations, but drawing no overall conclusion about the structure,” Cobb said in an email response.
In that paper, Watson and Crick briefly acknowledged the work of Franklin and Wilkins, but claimed they were unaware of the details. In their 1954 paper describing the double helix, however, they acknowledged that, without Franklin’s data, “the formulation of our structure would have been most unlikely, if not impossible”.
While much of this was already known, the new article brings to light facts and events that may have been overlooked, neuroscientist Hannah Franklin, Rosalind’s great-niece, said. In an email, Hannah Franklin said the article brings an important message: “that despite not being formally acknowledged as an equal contributor at the time, and facing a series of challenges and unfortunate events including the publication of James Watson’s misleading ‘fictional’ book years after she died, she should not be remembered as a victim of hardship or misogyny”.
She added: “From what I understand speaking to family members over the years, she definitely would not have wanted to be remembered as such. In many ways this undermines her value as a scientist (she also made significant contributions beyond her work on DNA), but also her value as the formidable human being that she was.”
The way they were
Professor Simon M Hughes, a cell biologist at King’s College who met Wilkins a few times, mentioned the difference in approach among Franklin, Watson and Crick.
“From what I can tell, Rosalind was very serious — a doer, not a talker; the total opposite of Watson and Crick, whose strength was in hypothesis building based on balance of probability and extensive reading,” Hughes said in an email response.
“She definitely did not do much wrong, she just had a different approach. Unlike W + C, she did not feel relaxed about being wrong — she wanted to get solid evidence, which W + C definitely did not have,” he said.
Hughes agreed that Franklin was not a victim and found the article by Cobb and Comfort more balanced “than has sometimes been stated — which is good”.
He added that Franklin was actually a friend of both Watson and Crick. “She spent several of her last weeks convalescing with the Cricks in their house in Cambridge. If she decided to do that when she knew she was likely dying, rather than go to a relative, it speaks volumes.”
Watson is 95 today; Crick and Wilkins both died in 2004.
What might have been
Cobb and Comfort describe an article that journalist Joan Bruce wrote for Time in 1953, but which was not published. Bruce noted that two teams were working on DNA structure: while Wilkins and Franklin were gathering experimental analysis using X-ray data, Watson and Crick were working on data.
“It is tantalising to think how people might remember the double-helix story had Bruce’s article been published… From the outset, Franklin would have been represented as an equal member of a quartet who solved the double helix…,” Cobb and Comfort write.
Given that her one-time colleague Wilkins shared the prize with Watson and Crick, is it reasonable to assume that Franklin too would have shared it had she been alive in 1962? Asked that question, Cobb said: “Yes, I don’t think anyone disputes that.”