In Defense Of Rosalind Franklin
The discoverer of the structure of DNA.
“As a scientist, Miss Franklin was distinguished by extreme clarity and perfection in everything she undertook. Her photographs are among the most beautiful X-ray photographs of any substance ever taken.”
The scene is at King’s College (London), the year was 1952 and the protagonist of this narrative is Rosalind Franklin. In her lab, an x-ray machine has been beaming for more than one hundred hours towards a scattering of DNA fibers. In the context we encounter ourselves in, the structure of this molecule is unknown — or at least it was.
The fifty-first time’s the charm!
What’s the result of this experiment? A photograph. But not just any image.
It’s the famous “Photograph 51” and the picture it portrays is a two-stranded DNA in the form of a double helix that contains the code of life. That’s the information of three million years of human history.
She made it. Rosalind Franklin did it.
However, it was the 50s — gender roles were embedded in our culture at that time, and misogyny in academic fields was in the air.
At the end of this tragic story, Franklin’s peer Maurice Wilkins at King’s college handed her photo to a pair of scientists, James Watson and Francis Crick, at another laboratory who were also in the DNA race.
There’s no need to mention all this was without her knowledge or consent for that matter.
The screen shuts down with Watson, Crick, and Wilkins receiving the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1962 for “the discovery of the DNA structure” —Franklin had perished from ovarian cancer in 1958, at age 37.
Nobel Prizes are not given posthumously.
Still, there’s more to recount in that story. Rosalind Franklin cannot be seen as the underdog or the victim in the discovery of the double-helix.
She was a chemist, physicist, biologist, and expert in crystallography — in other words, a world-class, outright scientist with a deep piece of knowledge in most fields in science.
Her career was full of accomplishments before and after “Photograph 51” that has left a legacy in the modern world.
Franklin’s life is worth telling from the beginning to the very end so as to get the big picture of who she was and how is she commemorated nowadays.
![Portrait of Rosalind Franklin. [Wikimedia Commons]](https://miro.medium.com/v2/resize:fit:2000/format:webp/0*eKwWjweH2fIW0sQM.jpg)
Rosalind Franklin was born on July 25, 1920, at the core of a Jewish family in London. She was a multifaceted woman. In contrast to the common stereotype of a scientist — cold, workaholic, and without any other interest apart from its job — she loved going hiking and traveling since a young age.
At age 18, she gained a scholarship at Cambridge University.
Later on obtained her Ph.D. in physical chemistry at the British Coal Utilisation Research Association (BCURA) due to her research on the structure, chemical bonds, and porosity of coal by employing a technique known as x-ray crystallography.
This played a key role in the effectiveness of Second World War gas masks, which contained charcoal filters that helped the soldiers stay protected.
If in the 21st century it is difficult to find a job, imagine in the 1940s.
After her work on coal, Franklin wanted to pursue something different, that would enable her to perfect her skills in x-ray crystallography.
Hence, a friend of a friend introduced her to Jacques Mering who offered her a place at the Laboratoire Central des Services Chimiques de l’Etat in Paris — where she stayed for four years and later on moved to King’s College in 1951 to work in the identification of the formation of DNA.
Let’s make a parenthesis here.
What is x-ray crystallography?
Basically, x-ray crystallography is a technique used to obtain the pattern or arrangement of atoms within a crystal molecule in order to determine the three-dimensional structure of that substance.
The process can be broken down into three steps:
- The crystal molecule of interest is sufficiently purified — it means samples that contain only molecules of one type and as few impurities as possible.
- The crystal is shot by an X-ray beam, which is diffracted in a particular pattern when it makes contact with an atom.
- The scattering pattern of the X-ray is recorded and used to illustrate details of the molecule’s structure.
Where did we leave? Ah yes, at King’s College, where Franklin began to work alongside Maurice Wilkins, despite their many misunderstandings.
The two of them did not get along, there was a lot of friction between their personalities which made the two of them work separately.
She was a strong-willed, vigorous woman who liked to discuss — and it did not help at all that Wilkins first thought of her as his “assistant” and treated her as such because of her gender.
So that was the implicit arrangement: Rosalind focused on x-ray crystallography in the lab while Wilkins passed the time at the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge where his friend Francis Crick was with James Watson researching every possible data on the DNA model.
As you can see, during those decades there was a race to determine the structure of DNA in the scientific community.
Many biologists, physicists, and chemists were greatly influenced by the science book “What’s life?” by Erwin Schrödinger.
Schrödinger argued that the key to understanding life itself was by understanding where was our genetic information contained and how it works — when Schrödinger published his book there was a dispute whether it was proteins or DNA that contained our genes.
Watson and Crick were on a rocky path. Their attempt to build a DNA model had been disproved by Franklin when they invited her and Wilkins to see what they had come up with.
Their model was an inside-out triple helix which was wrong because, as Rosalind pointed out, DNA was water-rich and therefore the three sugar-and-phosphate backbone had to be outside instead of at the core of the prototype they had designed.
Franklin and Wilkins went back to King’s College to continue working on x-ray crystallography. As we mentioned, in 1952 “Photograph 51” appeared but that’s not all.
Rosalind had taken two x-ray photos that pictured two out of the three forms of DNA that we know today. The first is form A which presents about 75% of humidity, and the other, the most common, is the B form whose level of water is 95%.
The DNA picture of Photograph 51 was from the form B category. As a scientist, Franklin continued to collect enough data to support her hypothesis.
left, form A, at right, form B. [Forensic Genealogy]
In 1953, Wilkins handed Watson and Crick Photograph 51 and that image was exactly what they needed.
The two had constructed a model of the double helix with a hypothesis to explain how it makes copies of itself by unwinding into single strands and attaching with a complementary nucleobase — either adenine (A) pairs with thymine (T) or cytosine (C) pairs with guanine (G) — creating two double helices. They lacked the evidence.
As Watson wrote in his book DNA: The Story of the Genetic Revolution…
“What got us more excited was the complementarity of the base sequences along the two chains. If you knew the sequence — the order of the bases — along one chain, you automatically knew the sequence along the other.”
Months later, a series of three papers were published on Nature about the discovery of the DNA structure. Watson and Crick’s paper was rolled out first, and their names would be taught in academia from now on.
Franklin’s work only came up as a ‘support’ to their finding.
It’s fair to say during that time she became friends with Crick and his wife, and before she decided to move to Birkbeck College to make great findings in the structure of the poliovirus, she was on good terms with Watson.
Franklin died in 1958, at the age of 38, following a diagnosis of ovarian cancer — probably due to the radiation she exposed herself during her work on X-ray crystallography.
Well, that seemed to be it. Until Watson wrote his popular, and controversial, autobiography The Double Helix in which he depicts Franklin as the following:
There was never lipstick to contrast with her straight black hair, while at the age of thirty-one her dresses showed all the imagination of English blue-stocking adolescents.
If it is already difficult to make a name of yourself in the scientific community, imagine being a woman in the 50s where female intellectuals were commonly referred to as bluestockings or whose first impression in their workspace was being seen as someone’s assistant — which happened to Franklin.
Sexism and misogyny were predominant.
Nonetheless, her work did not go unseen.
After Rosalind’s death, John Desmond Bernal, a pioneer in the use of X-ray crystallography and who enabled her to transfer to Birkbeck, wrote the following extract in Nature:
“…she proved to be an admirable director of a research team and inspired those who worked with her to reach the same high standard. Her devotion to research showed itself at its finest in the last months of her life. Although stricken with an illness which she knew would be fatal, she continued to work right up to the end. Her early death is a great loss to science”
Years later, Watson wrote an epilogue to “The Double Helix” in which he corrected himself from how he characterized Franklin in his book.
“Since my initial impressions of her, both scientific and personal (as recorded in the early pages of this book), were often wrong, I want to say something here about her achievements … By then all traces of our early bickering were forgotten, and we both came to appreciate greatly her personal honesty and generosity, realizing years too late the struggles that the intelligent woman faces to be accepted by a scientific world which often regards women as mere diversions from serious thinking.”
One question is, was it to redeem Franklin, or himself?
Nowadays, biographers such as Brenda Maddox in her book titled the “Dark Lady of DNA” have brought light to the events that happened in the race of discovering the DNA structure from another perspective.
Awards and organizations are named after this amazing scientist.
The Rosalind Franklin Institute in Rutherford Appleton Laboratory focuses on developing technological innovations in order to “tackle important health research challenges.”
The Royal Society Rosalind Franklin Award established in 2003 is given annually by the Royal Society in her honor.
Frankly, it is gratifying to know that more people are stepping out of the academic mold and realizing that from every story there are different versions in which some give true credit to who deserves it — and others that just take it.
“Science and everyday life cannot and should not be separated.
- Rosalind Elsie Franklin (1920 - 1958)
Sources:
Bernal J.D. (1958). Dr. Rosalind E. Franklin, Nature, 182 (4629) 154–154 | doi:10.1038/182154a0
Mott, V. (n.d.). Determining atomic structures by X-ray crystallography. Lumenlearning.Com. Retrieved November 12, 2021, from https://courses.lumenlearning.com/introchem/chapter/determining-atomic-structures-by-x-ray-crystallography/
O’Carroll, E. (2013, July 25). Rosalind Franklin: Was she robbed of the credit for discovering the double helix? Christian Science Monitor (Boston, Mass.: 1983). https://www.csmonitor.com/Technology/2013/0725/Rosalind-Franklin-Was-she-robbed-of-the-credit-for-discovering-the-double-helix
Piver, M. S. (2003). Rosalind Franklin. Oncology Times, 25(8), 7.
Sayeed, S. (2021, October 23). The Dark Lady of DNA — Salwa Sayeed — medium. Medium. https://medium.com/@salwasayeed236/the-dark-lady-of-dna-49419bd936dc
