Last week we discussed several Nobel Prizes that were not awarded in Medicine or Physiology, and I promised to return to the topic. Left out last week was the Nobel Prize never awarded to Rosalind Franklin, who provided the data that conclusively demonstrated the helical structure of double-stranded DNA, of which genes are made.
The conventional story goes something like this: In Cambridge one afternoon in the early 1950s, the very happy duo of James Dewey Watson and Francis H.C. Crick entered The Eagle pub and announced they had discovered “the secret of life.” We now know it probably did not happen exactly like that, with two intrepid young scientists making models of adenine-thymine and guanine-cytosine base pairs that held the DNA double helix together. But in 1962 they did share the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine with Maurice Wilkns for their structure. It is safe to say this correct structure of DNA began the revolution in molecular biology that shows no signs of slowing down more than 70 years later.
But as with every discovery in science, something was left out of Watson’s standard account. He, Crick, and Wilkins saw further because they were standing on the shoulders of giants. [1] One of those giants was Rosalind Franklin. Contrary to popular belief that had its genesis in Watson’s personal, semi-historical account of those exhilarating days in his The Double Helix (1968), those adjacent to the story knew very well who had contributed what to the structure of DNA.
In the book, Watson took one look at the crucial photograph of an x-ray diffraction pattern that Franklin had produced in her very exacting research and immediately understood its significance – DNA exists as a helix – despite knowing virtually nothing about x-ray diffraction. Even granting his acknowledged precocity then and subsequent leadership in molecular biology that culminated in direction of the Human Genome Project in its early days, this was highly unlikely. [2] And as it turns out (Nature podcast transcript, 2023):
According to (Watson), he sees photograph 51, he immediately realises DNA must be some kind of helix. And he and Crick then go on in the next few weeks to discover the structure. Now the implication of that is that this photograph, which was taken by Franklin and her PhD student Raymond Gosling the year before, the implication of this is that Franklin — who was a very smart person — sat on this bit of data and didn’t get it. Whereas Watson, who knew very little about X-ray crystallography, he took one glance at it. And bingo, he instantly knew what it meant. And this just strikes any historian who studies this as being rather unlikely.
…(however)…
When Watson first got into the DNA problem, in November of 1951, he attends a seminar by Franklin. And in that seminar, she presented both A- and B-DNA and said they are big, both of them were a big helix, with the phosphate backbones on the outside with the bases pointing in, right, and gave some basic parameters of it that are essentially the ones that that they used to solve the structure. So that was already known.
So, the famous photograph 51 of the B-form of DNA is unlikely to have given Watson a sudden insight into DNA being a helix, as aside from Watson not really knowing much about X-ray crystallography, nobody really doubted DNA was a helix at this time. Matthew and Nathaniel also discovered a programme from the Royal Society with a talk listed about the structure of DNA, and it was to be given by Crick, Watson, Wilkins and Franklin. That wasn’t all though, they also came upon an unpublished news article written for TIME magazine.
And this is the article that was supposed to go with the very famous pictures, which we’ve all seen now, of Watson and Crick in front of the model. So, we knew these photos had been taken for TIME Magazine, but it was never any trace of this article. And then we find this in the Churchill college archives at Cambridge. And this article, which is a bit poor, from a scientific point of view, which is probably why didn’t get published, presents the discovery precisely as a collaborative work between the King’s people — Wilkins, and Franklin — on the one hand, and with Watson and Crick in Cambridge, on the other. And presents it in a much more egalitarian approach. And this article was written in conjunction with Franklin.
Immediately after publication of The Double Helix both Wilkins and Crick challenged Watson’s account. They also objected to his treatment of Rosalind Franklin, but not too loudly. Since then, documentary evidence has been revealed that shows how important Franklin’s research was to the “secret of life.” Included in this is a report from Wilkins and Franklin that Wilkins gave to Watson and Crick while they were floundering. Aside from Watson’s self-aggrandizement, what made all this possible?
In the Nature podcast, Hannah Franklin (a great niece of Rosalind and then a PhD student at the Francis Crick Institute and University College-London), says this about her aunt:
She didn’t suffer fools gladly (and therefore undoubtedly had a dim view of the callow [3] Watson from the start). And I think people have that perception of her. And sometimes it’s been misinterpreted as her being remembered as this quite cold character. And all she cared about was the science. But, you know, from what I’ve heard from family members, she was an amazing, warm woman.
…
She made significant contributions in the space of viruses and coal and carbon. And that actually, her time working on DNA were perhaps some of the unhappiest of her life. You know, at Kings, she wasn’t allowed into the senior common room alongside her male counterparts. She wasn’t allowed purely for being a woman. So when you think about in pubs, and in common rooms, the sort of informal scientific conversations that take place, she wasn’t a part of that. (emphasis added)
In retrospect, it is clear that Rosalind Franklin was an equal partner in the discovery of the structure of DNA. On this we can let her niece summarize her life:
So, I think to be remembered for being a significant contributor in very impactful science, and not just because of the obstacles that she faced, and that she would have wanted to be remembered for the science and for the human that she was not just put on this pedestal of being some hero because of the obstacles that she faced. So, I think that’s a really important message that I think and I’ve interpreted from the family is what they want her legacy to be.
The contributions of Rosalind Franklin to solving the structure of DNA have been covered extremely well in an article published earlier this month in the Journal of the History of Biology. From the Abstract:
This essay, co-authored by a historian of science and an X-ray crystallographer, sheds new light on Rosalind Franklin’s Photograph 51. We refute the infamous claim that, unlike James Watson, Franklin failed to see the picture’s potential significance for interpreting the helical structure of DNA. Rather, Franklin decided to take Photograph 51 precisely because she knew that key parameters of DNA’s B form helix could be calculated from the resulting image. We show that she had in fact already made those calculations — on her earlier Photograph 49 — and she reused the same DNA sample for Photograph 51 to create a better-centered but otherwise identical diffraction image that would be suitable for publication. Thus Photograph 51 was not the result of an experiment in need of analysis, but was refined documentation for calculations that she had already performed on the earlier photograph. We argue that colleagues and later commentators did not merely overlook Franklin’s original reason for creating the strikingly clear and informative Photograph 51, they rhetorically erased her skill and judgment by describing it as though nature spoke for itself through the image — and to Watson, but not to Franklin.
This article is both technical and appropriately sharp. It includes this photograph from 1950 of the Rosalind Franklin who was not the person of Jim Watson’s imagination.
The question remains, why did Rosalind Franklin not share in the Nobel Prize for the structure of DNA awarded to the three men. The short answer is that she died of ovarian cancer in 1958 at the age of 37. Had she lived there would have been two Nobel Prizes awarded for DNA. The first would have been the Chemistry Prize to Maurice Wilkins and Rosalind Franklin for proving that DNA exists as a helix. The second would have been awarded to Watson and Crick in Physiology or Medicine (note physiology comes first) for showing how the double helix was put together of simple subunits that explained how the molecule could be replicated, with one strand being the template for the other, and account for the complexity of life.
The longer answer is that the life of Rosalind Franklin illustrated the life of a woman in science, even through the 1970s and into the 1980s based on my long experience in biomedical research. The outstanding scientist I worked with while I was a postdoctoral fellow was the first woman to get tenure in a basic science department in one of the world’s leading medical schools. This did not happen until an outside reviewer took the local powers that be to task for their blindness. Things have changed, much for the better.
Finally, for those of you who want to get a feel for immediate reactions to The Double Helix, there is nothing better than the review of the book by Sir Peter Medawar in The New York Review of Books (28 May 1968). The perfect title of his review is “Lucky Jim.” Far too few biologists have read it. Sir Peter’s take can be summarized here:
It could be said of Watson that, for a man so cheerfully conscious of matters of priority, he is not very generous to his predecessors. The mention of Astbury is perfunctory and of Avery a little condescending. Fred Griffith is not mentioned at all. Yet a paragraph or two would have done it, without derogating at all the splendor of his own achievement. Why did he not make the effort?
It was not lack of generosity, I suggest, but stark insensibility. These matters belong to scientific history, and the history of science bores most scientists stiff. A great many highly creative scientists (I classify Jim Watson among them) take it quite for granted, though they are usually too polite or too ashamed to say so, that an interest in the history of science is a sign of failing or unawakened powers. It is not good enough to dismiss this as cultural barbarism, a coarse renunciation of one of the glories of humane learning. It points toward something distinctive about scientific learning, and instead of making faces about it we should try to find out why such an attitude is natural and understandable. A scientist’s present thoughts and actions are of necessity shaped by what others have done and thought before him; they are the wavefront of a continuous secular process in which The Past does not have a dignified independent existence on its own. Scientific understanding is the integral of a curve of learning; science therefore in some sense comprehends its history within itself. No Fred, no Jim: that is obvious, at least to scientists; and being obvious, at it is understandable that it should be left unsaid.
This is true. Working scientists generally have no sense of the history of their discipline, or even the subdiscipline that takes up all their working (and “nonworking”) hours. Alas, this leads to blindness and bullheadedness and it is largely responsible for the failing fortunes of science in the current age. For example, if biomedical scientists today had had the wit to know, or to find out, that vaccines against coronaviruses will never be sterilizing based on research that goes back to the discovery of the first coronavirus before World War II, a lot of our current angst could have been avoided. This blindness also has opportunity costs. True discoveries in biological science always have a historical component, and those ignorant of this history are condemned to miss them.
Thank you for reading! See you next week. Less than three weeks to Election Day in these United States. Who knows what might happen? Stay safe out there!
Notes
[1] One of those giants was the scientist who told Watson that the structure of one of the nucleotides he was using during his model-building phase was wrong, because the textbook he used had included the unlikely tautomer (alternative structure) of the nucleotide. Had this not been corrected, the pieces of the model would never have fit together and someone else would have discovered the “secret of life.”
[2] Watson wrote the first textbook of molecular biology, Molecular Biology of the Gene (1965), which landed as a classic and remained so in subsequent editions. I have used the latter editions for study and for teaching. It is unmatched. It also gave rise to a series of textbooks such as Molecular Biology of the Cell, which has had the same effect on the discipline of cell biology.
[3] He remained true to his nature through the end of his long career. My only personal contact with James D. Watson was a talk he gave at my home institution. He regaled his audience with tales of his extracurricular adventures in Cambridge, all those years ago.
And a big thank you to RK for sending me the paper on Rosalind Franklin in the Journal of the History of Biology. I might have missed it otherwise.
