Was She, or Wasn't She?

Credit in science is not always distributed fairly. The losers are often graduate students or people otherwise in no position to protest. Among the most egregious examples, in my view, was the 1974 Nobel physics prize for the discovery of pulsars which was awarded to Anthony Hewish even though the radio-emitting objects had been first discovered, and their stellar nature verified, by his graduate student Jocelyn Bell Burnell.1 Feminists have made much of the case of Rosalind Franklin, whose X-ray data were essential to Watson and Crick's discovery of the structure of DNA. She has now become elevated, quite possibly against her wishes, into an icon for the oppression of women scientists. "Nova explores the role of the woman who paved the way but never got the credit she deserved," says a press release for a TV documentary to run next month, in the same week as the 50th anniversary of the Watson and Crick paper in Nature. Franklin's role in the discovery has by now been so politicized that the image of the robbed heroine may lie beyond the reach of objective analysis. However, much new information has become available, including a revised edition of Horace Judson's The Eighth Day of Creation2 and a biography of Franklin by Brenda Maddox.3 One problem for the argument that Watson and Crick robbed Franklin of due credit for her share in the discovery is the lack of any evidence that this view was shared by Franklin herself. Far from being some powerless graduate student at the time she took her X-ray photos of DNA, she was an independent researcher of established reputation. She had already decided to leave Kings College, London, where her work was done, and had a new job waiting for her. She came from a wealthy family and had independent means. As Maddox's biography makes clear, she was a strong character who vigorously objected to treatment she thought was unfair, such as being paid less than male researchers by the government agency that funded her research. Yet there is no record that she felt she had been cheated by Watson and Crick. She became friends with both men afterwards, and spent her last convalescence in Crick's house before her death, at age 37, from ovarian cancer. Crick has said she never raised with him the question of his use of her data. Franklin's silence is of course not conclusive-Jocelyn Bell did not complain when the Nobel prize for her discovery was given to others-but nor is it a fact that can be airily dismissed. Those who assert Franklin was robbed of credit for her work do not always make clear that she published everything she knew about DNA in the same issue of Nature as Watson and Crick's article about their discovery. In that article, Watson and Crick specifically acknowledged her work, although the adequacy of that acknowledgement is open to question. Thus unlike Bell, who got her name on the discovery paper, but submerged among the names of a bunch of other graduate students and her supervisor, Franklin described her contribution independently in an article of which she was the lead author. What then is basis of the claim that she was robbed of due credit? It comes from Watson's own description in his book The Double Helix of being shown one of Franklin's X-ray photos of DNA by Crick's friend Maurice Wilkins, the deputy director of the Kings College lab. The photo, Watson writes, spurred him and Crick to resume building models of DNA and provided essential parameters. "Rosy, of course, did not directly give us her data. For that matter, no one at Kings realized they were in our hands," Watson wrote. The implication was incendiary enough, and the condescending portrait of Franklin in his book did not help matters. The Double Helix portrays Watson's thoughts and deeds as a 25-year-old man. The glee he expresses at having obtained Franklin's data behind her back may well have been genuine. But Crick was the senior member of the team by 12 years and, it is probably fair to say, the intellectual leader. There is no reason to suppose he shared Watson's views, and indeed, like Wilkins and Pauling, he vigorously disputed the book's accuracy. Watson's description raises four obvious questions, which there is space to consider here only in outline. 1) Did Watson and Crick obtain Franklin's data fairly? 2) Did they acknowledge it fairly? 3) Did they tell Franklin after the event how deeply they had relied on her data? 4) If Franklin was unfairly treated, was it because she was a woman? With all these issues, it helps to understand the state of play within and outside the Kings College laboratory where Franklin worked. The head of the lab, John Randall, was a distinguished wartime physicist who invented the cavity magnetron. His second in command was Maurice Wilkins, another wartime physicist, who was working on DNA and had already obtained X-ray photos of its structure. Randall, building up a new biophysics laboratory, hired Franklin, a specialist on the structure of coal, to come to the lab and work on protein structure. At the last minute, at Wilkins' suggestion, he asked her to switch to DNA, but he did so in words that implied it would be her exclusive problem. Wilkins found himself obliged not only to share the DNA problem, but to hand over to Franklin his graduate student Raymond Gosling, some of his equipment, and a particularly good sample of DNA prepared by Rudolf Signer of Berne. It was with the Signer DNA that Wilkins had obtained X-ray photos suggesting DNA was helical. It was also with Signer's DNA, kept at higher humidity, that Franklin was later to obtain the much clearer "photograph 51" that Wilkins showed to Watson. Randall thus set up, whether by design or inadvertence, a poisonous situation between Wilkins and Franklin. Wilkins continued to view DNA as his problem and expected to collaborate with Franklin on solving it. Franklin, for her part, made not the slightest move to accommodate him. She repulsed Wilkins' attempts to collaborate, saying she had no interest in his interpretation of her data. Franklin emerges from Maddox's biography as a highly able researcher with a warm and in many ways attractive personality. But she was also a snob, both socially and intellectually. "He's so middle-class," she said of Wilkins to a friend. In a letter to another, she voiced the following opinion of her new colleagues, presumably including Wilkins: "The other middle and senior people are positively repulsive, and it's they who set the general tone. I've got myself organized so that I hardly ever see any of them. The other serious trouble is that there isn't a first-class or even a good brain among them - in fact no one with whom I particularly want to discuss anything, scientific or otherwise…." Her disdain had its price. The Wilkins-Franklin "team" at Kings College was entirely dysfunctional. Crick kept urging Wilkins to build models - a shortcut to interpreting the ambiguous X-ray data - and even handed over all his jigs after his first attempt at model-building failed and he was ordered to desist. But Wilkins ignored the advice, despite the accurate warning that Linus Pauling at Stanford was hot on the same trail. Crick was impatient with the impasse at Kings. Wilkins was not making much progress. Franklin wanted to solve DNA in her own thorough way but wasn't even sure that DNA, at least in its dry form, was a helix. He had a chance to make his own interpretation of her new data when she described it at a lecture to which both he and Watson were invited. But Crick couldn't attend. Watson didn't take notes and misunderstood what he heard. (That was the genesis of the first, incorrect model the two built, one with 3 chains and the bases pointing outward.) Though Watson misreported Franklin's lecture, the correct version came to Crick by two routes. One was the photo 51, which Gosling had properly showed to Wilkins who remained his PhD advisor. Wilkins was indiscreet in showing it to Watson because Watson, even though not given a copy, was able to record some of the vital parameters. Second, Randall prepared a report of work in his lab to show to a committee of the Medical Research Council that supported him. A member of the committee, Max Perutz, was a colleague of Crick's in Cambridge. The report contained the same data, though in somewhat updated form, as Franklin had given at her seminar. It was not confidential and Perutz showed a copy to Crick. Did Crick obtain Franklin's data fairly? His position is that he did, because the data that reached him circuitously was essentially the same as what she had already made public. Whether or not one accepts that view, it differs strongly in character from Watson's implication that they stole her data. Did Crick acknowledge her data fairly? Earlier X-ray photos by Wilkins and by William Astbury had suggested that DNA was helical. But since both were based on mixtures of the dry and wet forms of DNA, which have slightly different structures, they were fuzzy. The only source of clear data was Franklin's measurements of the Signer DNA Wilkins had handed over to her. An explicit acknowledgement of this fact would indeed have been fair. But in negotiating the wording of the acknowledgement with Wilkins, the lab deputy and his personal friend, Crick may have found himself in a difficult position. The more generously he acknowledged Franklin, the more he would have slighted Wilkins, both of whom contributed papers for the same issue of Nature. Wilkins indeed asked him to strike a reference to the "very beautiful" X-ray photos taken by Gosling and Franklin. Wilkins, obviously, was not the best representative of Franklin's interests. Randall, who had a duty to protect them, evidently did not do so. The acknowledgement appeared as follows: "We have also been 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, London." Given the essential nature of Franklin's data, it was short of perfect. But given the mutual discord between Wilkins and Franklin, Crick could not easily have forced Wilkins to accept an acknowledgement that gave greater credit to Franklin's data. In an article a year later, without such constraints, he stated frankly that "without this data, the formulation of our structure would have been most unlikely, if not impossible." Did Crick ever discuss with Franklin, after publication and in the 5 years before her death, the extent of his reliance on her data? He has said he did not, and that she never raised the subject. It may seem odd that two friendly participants in a historic discovery would never discuss it. But it was probably obvious to Franklin, as Crick believes, that the structure rested on her data because no one else was producing any experimental results. And both knew that Crick had understood what Franklin's data meant before she did. He had seen that her data clearly spelt helix, which Franklin for months was unsure of, and that they showed the two chains were anti-parallel, which Franklin did not see at all. So it is at least understandable, if still somewhat puzzling, that each may have seen no purpose in discussing the matter. Randall treated Franklin very poorly, in pitting her against Wilkins, in failing to require a full and fair acknowledgement for her in Watson and Crick's paper, and in writing to her as she was leaving Kings with the insufferable direction that she was henceforth not even to think of DNA. But did any of this come about because she was a woman? Ann Sayre, Franklin's first biographer, wrote that science at Kings College was a man's domain that excluded women and that "there was one other woman scientist on the laboratory staff besides Rosalind." That assertion is incorrect. There were 10 women, who held between a third and a quarter of the professional posts, according to Horace Judson. The seven whom he was able to trace "agreed that women at their laboratory were treated equitably," Judson wrote in an appendix to The Eighth Day of Creation. One, Dame Honor Fell, told him that "I never saw a sign of sex discrimination. Of course, Franklin was a rather difficult character - and she disliked Wilkins with whom she was working. They were both I think rather difficult people. But I don't believe she was discriminated against because she was a woman. I never saw a sign of it - and I'm sure I would have done." Franklin's defenders, notably Sir Aaron Klug, who worked with her after she left Kings, have argued that she would have discovered the structure of DNA by herself. It's an interesting what-if. She did not plan to continue to work on DNA after she left Kings, and she was two steps short of the solution. "She had not perceived that the backbones run in opposite directions," Judson writes. "She had not started modeling the B [wet] form as a double helix and so had yet even to encounter the problem of fitting the bases inside." Yet she was close enough, Judson notes, to see at once that the Watson-Crick structure was essentially correct, surprising Watson with her gracious assent. Of course, there are other what-ifs to consider. If Watson had been killed by a tennis ball, Crick would probably not have solved the structure alone, he has written. But Wilkins was about to work on DNA full time as soon as Franklin left Kings. Under Crick's relentless badgering he would doubtless have built models and solved the structure soon enough, Crick believes. Pauling, once convinced that his own proposed structure for DNA was incorrect, would doubtless have returned to the fray. Had either Wilkins or Pauling discovered the structure of DNA, Franklin's credited role in the discovery could have been close to zero. Watson and Crick's impatience guaranteed her a prominent place in scientific history, even if the poisoned relationships at Kings denied her a more generous acknowledgement. Nicholas Wade is a science writer for The New York Times References 1. N. Wade, "Discovery of pulsars: A graduate student's story," Science, 189:358-64, 1975. 2. H.F. Judson, The Eighth Day of Creation, Expanded edition, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press, 1996. 3. B. Maddox, Rosalind Franklin, HarperCollins, 2002.

Was She, or Wasn't She?

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