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 lecturers argue in an article to mark the seventieth anniversary of Francis Crick and James Watson’s paper on the construction of DNA. They are saying an neglected letter and a draft journal article add to the proof that the favored view of Franklin’s function is mistaken.

“It deprives her of her company,” says Matthew Cobb on the College of Manchester, UK. “That’s not proper.”

In keeping with many accounts, Franklin, a chemist at King’s Faculty London, did all of the laborious work to elucidate DNA’s construction, however Crick and Watson on the College of Cambridge obtained 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 e-book The Double Helix, but it surely isn’t true, says Cobb. Watson used Picture 51 as a dramatic system.

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

Extra essential to the invention than Picture 51 was a Medical Analysis Council (MRC) report that included a web page from Franklin on her work. This was given to Crick by his supervisor, Max Perutz. The information 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 Consolation, a historian of drugs at Johns Hopkins College 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 may be within the lecture, Franklin and Gosling suppose it may not be worthwhile for Crick to attend. The letter exhibits that Franklin knew Perutz was sharing her findings with Crick and appeared nice with it.

“One of many the reason why they’re so relaxed about that is that DNA was not the large deal it’s now,” says Cobb. It solely later turned clear how essential it’s.

Cobb and Consolation 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 one another’s work sometimes, or wrestling over a typical downside”. 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.

Certainly, there isn’t 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 turned mates 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 demise, she did groundbreaking work on viral construction that, by itself, may nicely have gained her a Nobel prize had she lived.

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

In 2003, as an illustration, Franklin’s biographer Brenda Maddox wrote in Nature that “the legend of Franklin, the wronged heroine” has “overshadowed her mental power and independence each as a scientist and as a person”. On the very least, Franklin’s story is extra complicated than the parable.