On This Day in History: April 16

Rosalind Franklin and the sequencing of DNA

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Rosalind Franklin, who made a vital contribution to understanding the structure of DNA, missed out on not just one Nobel Prize, but two. Who knows what might have resulted had she not died so young?

--On This Day in History Shit Went Down: April 16, 1958--

Was it unethical, or outright thievery? Throughout history—and the present—men take credit for the work of women, and Watson and Crick were no exception.

Scientists James Watson and Francis Crick were at the University of Cambridge. Scientists Rosalind Franklin and Maurice Wilkins were at King’s College. Wilkins was shy and Franklin forceful. They did not get along. Watson and Crick tried to crack DNA in 1952 and it was a colossal fuckup. Meanwhile, Franklin was mostly working on her own because Wilkins couldn’t handle her. Wilkins started hanging out with Watson and Crick, becoming pals.

The decoding of DNA happened because of an X-ray, taken by Franklin’s PhD student Raymond Gosling under her guidance, called “Photo 51.” Franklin was a chemist and X-ray crystallographer, and I don’t know what that is. Photo 51 is an X-ray diffraction picture of a paracrystalline gel made of DNA fibers. Lost me on that too. What’s important is that in January 1953, when no one else was around, Watson, who was still fucking lost on modeling DNA, was visiting Wilkins at Kings and Wilkins said hey check out this Photo 51 shit. Cool, right? It’s important to note this was done without Franklin’s permission; that was definitely unethical.

In Watson’s own words on seeing the photo, “My mouth fell open and my pulse began to race.” He said it gave him a critical understanding of the double helix structure. But he needed more. To understand the exact chemical organization of the molecule he required the precise observations from the X-ray, which Franklin unwittingly provided the following month in an informal report to a molecular biologist at Cambridge, and those numbers eventually found their way to Watson and Crick. The report wasn’t confidential, but they came about it dishonestly and didn’t ask Franklin’s permission to interpret her data.

Watson and Crick cracked the code a month later, and almost immediately afterward Franklin abandoned her work on DNA and moved to Birkbeck, University of London to work on the molecular structure of viruses. Alas, she died from ovarian cancer on April 16, 1958, aged 37. She never learned how much Watson and Crick relied on her work, and in 1962 the pair, along with Wilkins, won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for the discovery. Watson said had she lived, Franklin likely would have won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, but posthumously awarded Nobel Prizes are rare.

Regarding the second Nobel, her team member at Birkbeck, Aaron Klug, continued Franklin’s pioneering work after her death, winning the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1982.

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