If it’s 28 February, it must be the anniversary of the day Francis Crick (allegedly) walked into the Eagle pub in Bene’t St, Cambridge, and announced
We have found the secret of life
He and James Watson had, indeed, discovered the chemical structure of DNA — but only because they’d nicked Rosalind Franklin’s data, right?
Well, it’s all a bit more complicated than that.
Molecular biologists Crick and Watson were working at Cambridge on the structure of DNA, while Franklin — an X-ray crystallographer — was at King’s College London, alongside biophysicist Maurice Wilkins and physics PhD student Raymond Gosling.
One of the things that makes this complicated is that Wilkins was Gosling’s PhD supervisor, then Gosling started working under Franklin, and then he became Wilkins’ student again. This may have been one of the reasons why Franklin and Wilkins didn’t get on (although there was a personality clash, too. According to Matthew Cobb, in his 2015 book Life’s Greatest Secret: The Race to Crack the Genetic Code, Wilkins was naturally quiet, while Franklin was “brusque and at times confrontational”. Although that sounds like a judgment that might not have been made about a man – or at least not phrased that way.)
Anyway, in May 1952, while Rosalind Franklin was his PhD supervisor, Gosling took Photo 51, which showed how X-ray beams scattered off a DNA fibre.
The London and Cambridge teams were not in direct competition — indeed, Watson wanted them all to collaborate, so they could beat Linus Pauling, a biochemist in America, who they definitely were racing against.
Watson visited King’s in January 1953 to show Wilkins Pauling’s first (incorrect) proposal for the structure of DNA, and encourage this collaboration. It was during this visit that Wilkins — who he was friendly with — showed Watson Photo 51.
This was a massive clue to the double helix they were looking for, but it wasn’t enough. They needed detailed data — and this is where it gets slightly murky.
Rosalind Franklin had been working this stuff out, and produced a report about her calculations for a visit to King’s from the Medical Research Council. This found its way to Max Perutz, a molecular biologist at Cambridge, who also happened to be Crick’s thesis advisor — so you may not need me to tell you who Perutz showed the report to.
There was no reason why Crick shouldn’t have seen the report, but he and Watson didn’t tell King’s they’d seen it, and didn’t ask Franklin if they could use it. We don’t know that they did this because they were sexist. We do know that Franklin later became friends with Crick and his wife, and we can speculate whether they would have treated the data the same way if it had come from a man.
Franklin’s work was published in the same issue of Nature as Crick and Watson’s, so we could argue that it wasn’t the sexism of her competitors that caused Franklin to be side-lined by history and only recently to have emerged, posthumously, into the light. That would be more down to the sexism of the scientific establishment and society at large.
Although that does still leave the question of James Watson.
Oh, boy.
We can say for certain that Watson is a sexist old goat, because he doesn’t seem to be able to stop telling people so. In his 1968 book, The Double Helix, his description of Franklin did not, shall we say, focus on her work first:
By choice she did not emphasize her feminine qualities. Though her features were strong, she was not unattractive and might have been quite stunning had she taken even a mild interest in clothes. This she did not. 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.
He also insisted on referring to her as ‘Rosy’, an abbreviation she never used, although she’d sadly been dead 10 years by then, so wouldn’t have known anything about it.
In 2003, discussing gene editing for beauty, Watson also told Channel 4’s documentary, DNA:
People say it would be terrible if we made all girls pretty. I think it would be great.
He has also declared that black people have lower IQ tests than whites because of genetics (rather than, say, anything to do with the tests themselves) and observed:
If you are really stupid, I would call that a disease.
So, it may be that Watson’s subsequent reputation made it easy to believe that Franklin was a victim of his sexism, rather than that she actually was. But she was still subject to society’s sexism while she was alive.
Still, thankfully, we live now in far more enlightened times…
(A footnote: apparently, the charging into the pub story was an invention. Ah, well.)
