I once attended a series of lectures at the Brookhaven National Laboratory delivered by James Watson. In his initial talk he spoke of the historical events that surrounded the discovery of the structure of DNA. Afterwards, there was time for one question. A person raised her hand. “Dr Watson,” she asked, “I wonder if you could comment a little bit more on Rosalind Franklin’s contribution to the discovery of DNA.” Whereupon some in the audience applauded.

The applause puzzled me. Those people evidently felt that the mere act of asking that question was praiseworthy. I’ve heard since that this scene – the asking of the Rosalind Franklin question, to a smattering of audience applause – often takes place at Watson’s public lectures and has for years. Why?

Recognition

Is the question motivated by the feeling that Franklin’s contribution to that Nobel-prize-winning discovery is insufficiently recognized today? This cannot be. Franklin, who died in 1958 aged just 37, is the subject of two biographies: Anne Sayre’s 1975 book Rosalind Franklin and DNA and Brenda Maddox’s Rosalind Franklin: The Dark Lady of DNA (reviewed in Physics World in December 2002; p42, print version).

The National Portrait Gallery in London hangs her photograph alongside those of Watson and the two physicists with whom he shared the 1962 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine – Francis Crick and Maurice Wilkins. The Franklin-Wilkins Building at King’s College London is co-named after her, while the Royal Society recently announced a £30,000 prize in her name. The Institute of Physics even has a new “Rosalind Franklin room” in its expanded headquarters in London. It is impossible to think about the discovery of DNA today without bringing to mind Rosalind Franklin.

Ironically, Watson is largely responsible. But for his coarse caricature of her in his 1968 book The Double Helix, Franklin’s collaborator Aaron Klug would not have written an article for Nature forcefully countering Watson’s account. Nor would the outraged community of crystallographers have sought to prevail on the initially reluctant Sayre (whose husband David is a crystallographer) to undertake a book about Franklin. Watson’s account was thus the triggering event that catapulted Rosalind Franklin to fame as one of the key players in the DNA discovery – even though this episode was only one of her contributions to science.

Justice

Is the Rosalind Franklin question motivated by the need to acknowledge a past injustice? This is more plausible. Maddox and Sayre describe the hurdles Franklin faced as a Jewish woman in science in British scientific institutions of the 1950s. For Sayre, the hurdles were almost entirely related to gender, while Maddox more accurately and persuasively attributes them to class and religion. And in his new biography, Watson and DNA, Victor McElheny notes how relentless Crick and Watson were, quoting Watson as saying: ” ‘Nice’ is what you do when you have nothing else to offer.”

Crick and Watson relied on two key pieces of information that were due to Franklin but obtained without her knowledge. One was her DNA Photograph 51, which Maurice Wilkins showed to Watson in January 1953. “The instant I saw the picture my mouth fell open and my pulse began to race,” Watson writes in The Double Helix, for he recognized immediately its tell-tale helical signature. It was psychologically the key event that inspired him to drop everything to search for the DNA structure.

The other piece of information used was Franklin’s measurements of a DNA unit cell, which she included in a report to the Medical Research Council. When Max Perutz passed this non-confidential but not really public report to Crick in February 1953, Crick realized that the two strands of the helix run in opposite directions.

Lacking these clues, Crick and Watson would not have been able to piece together the DNA structure as fast as they did. However, Crick and Watson also obtained other important clues from Astbury, Chargaff, Donohue, Furberg, Wilkins and others. Did Crick and Watson steal something from Franklin and present it as their own? No. She was close to figuring out the structure of DNA, but did not do it. The title of “discoverer” goes to those who first fit the pieces together. In rejecting Sayre’s claim that Franklin was the victim of “robbery”, the physicist Jeremy Bernstein has expressed the logic quite forcefully: “They made the double-helix scheme work. It is as simple as that.”

The critical point

The Rosalind Franklin question, however, is motivated by the feeling that “it” – not the priority claim, but something else – is not simple.

In the Nature paper of April 1953 in which Crick and Watson announced their discovery, they acknowledged being “stimulated by a knowledge of the general nature of the unpublished experimental results and ideas of Dr M H F Wilkins, Dr R E Franklin and their co-workers at King’s College”. This sentence was carefully crafted so that Franklin would not realize just how effectively Crick and Watson had used her data. She would die five years later without ever knowing that Watson and Crick had seen Photograph 51 and her unit-cell measurements, although Maddox says that she must have suspected. Neither Crick nor Watson mentioned her in their Nobel speeches.

Such stingy behaviour may not be unknown, or even uncommon, among scientists. However, our sensitivity to the norms of science and to violations of fair play heighten in proportion to the importance of the discovery – the DNA structure probably ranks as the single most important scientific discovery of the past 50 years – and in situations involving marginalized individuals.

The Rosalind Franklin question – and the applause it receives – is, I think, motivated less by the feeling that her contributions should be more widely recognized. Instead, it is more to do with the scientific community recalling and reasserting norms of fairness when they find these violated. Some day it may no longer be necessary to ask the Rosalind Franklin question. When this happens, it would also be worth applauding.