The real hero of the Double Helix discovery

Empire of the Mind

My introduction to Rosalind Franklin was through reading James Watson’s The Double Helix. Watson’s now infamous personal descriptions of Rosalind represent an unforgettably misogynist chapter in scientific history.

Rosalind was already an accomplished physical chemist when she arrived at the Biophysics unit of King’s College, London, in 1951. It was a time when the race to discover the DNA was apace and Maurice Wilkins, her supervisor, needed her x-ray diffraction experience, though he went out of his way to make work difficult for Rosalind. In February 1953, Rosalind wrote in her notebooks that the structure of DNA had two chains. She had already worked out that the molecule had its phosphate groups on the outside and that DNA existed in two forms.

Two weeks later, James Watson and Francis Crick, at Cambridge, built their now-celebrated model of DNA as a ‘double helix’. They did it with brilliant intuition, but also on the basis of Rosalind’s unpublished experimental evidence that generated measurements of the crucial distances in the DNA molecule, provided without her knowledge to Watson and Crick. She did not know that they had seen either her X-ray photograph, showing unmistakable evidence of a helical structure, or her precise measurements of the unit cell of the DNA crystal. Who gave them access to her work through irregular routes is not hard to guess.

In late January 1953, Wilkins had, not innocently, shown Franklin’s famous photograph 51, with its stark cross of black reflections, and given the crystalline parameters that she had so laboriously worked out, to Watson, who was visiting King’s College. Nor did Rosalind know that in February 1953, Watson and Crick were shown the Medical Research Council’s report summarising the work of all principal researchers, including hers.

In 1962, Watson, Crick and Maurice Wilkins received the Nobel Prize for the discovery of the structure of DNA. Notably absent from the podium was Rosalind, whose x-ray photographs of DNA contributed directly to the discovery of the double helix. Her premature death, combined with misogynist treatment by the male scientific establishment, cast her in a fashion that overshadowed her intellectual strength, independence and integrity as a scientist and an individual.

Watson was to write unashamedly, “Rosy, of course, did not directly give us her data. For that matter, no one at King’s realised they were in our hands”. By the time this admission appeared in his best-selling, much-acclaimed book of the discovery, The Double Helix, published in 1968, he was a Harvard Professor and a Nobel Laureate; and Rosalind was dead, having fallen to ovarian cancer in 1957, at the age of 38.

Other comments dismissive of ‘Rosy’ in Watson’s book caught the attention of the discerning public, and the emerging women’s movement. Watson wrote unabashedly, “Clearly, Rosy had to go or be put in her place […] Unfortunately, Maurice could not see any decent way to give Rosy the boot”. And, “Certainly, a bad way to go out into the foulness of a […] November night was to be told by a woman to refrain from venturing an opinion about a subject for which you were not trained”.

Rosalind was, in fact, far more accomplished at the time than Watson was. At the age of 21, she had started her research on crystalline materials as part of an important war-time project. Because of her expertise in ‘holes in coals’, she was invited to the French government’s central laboratory, where she mastered x-ray crystallography. Ironically, x-ray diffraction was one experimental technique in which Watson or Crick had no skills. Rosalind’s success landed her at King’s and on the DNA project. Watson does great disservice to a remarkable young woman scientist.

Since the time of such flamboyantly chauvinist description by Watson and his insistence on judging Rosalind by her appearance rather than her considerable accomplishments as a scientist, she has continued to grow as a feminist icon -- the Sylvia Plath of molecular biology -- a genius whose gifts were sacrificed for the greater glory of the male.

Yet, there is no evidence that Rosalind was bitter about their achievement or had any sense of having been outrun in a race that nobody but Watson and Crick knew was a race. Watson and Crick seem never to have told Rosalind directly what they subsequently said from public platforms long after her death: that they could not have discovered the double helix of DNA in the early months of 1953 without her work.

Brenda Maddox’s Rosalind Franklin: The Dark Lady of DNA is a riveting study of a brilliant lady scientist and a chronology of an epochal scientific adventure. Rosalind once wrote to her father that “Science and everyday life cannot and should not be separated”.

So was the cruel irony of her life and science.