Recommendable! I have blogged here about this dubious Nature journal article before. It appears that the female scientist was even dead wrong on the structure of DNA and that she failed to understand critical properties of DNA.
"... In fact Franklin’s contribution was recognized from the start. Watson and Crick, at the conclusion of their discovery paper, wrote: “We have also been stimulated by a knowledge of the general nature of the unpublished experimental results and ideas of Dr.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.” Moreover, Franklin published all her DNA results, in a paper of which she was lead author, in the same issue of Nature as the Watson–Crick paper. ...
In fact, she was leader of a rival team at a different institution. Listing one’s competitors as coauthors on a discovery paper is hardly a common practice. ...
In the book [The Double Helix (1968)], Watson mocked Franklin for resisting the idea that the DNA molecule was helical ... There was much truth in this assertion: she had even issued mock memorial invitations to lament the death of the helix hypothesis. ...
Franklin wasn’t sure, even by April 1953, that both forms of DNA visible to crystallographers were helical in structure. Though she knew the famous bases of DNA—designated A, T, G, and C—must be packed inside the helices, she had no idea how they might fit together. Because she refused to build models, she never came close to Watson’s pivotal insight that A always pairs with T, and C with G, forming cross-spiral ladder rungs of equal width. Finally, Franklin had failed to understand a critical feature of her data that was clear to Crick—namely, that DNA belonged to what crystallographers call the space group C2. This means, in brief, that the twin chains of the DNA molecule run in opposite, anti-parallel directions, such that the head of one chain lies against the foot of the other. ..."
In fact, she was leader of a rival team at a different institution. Listing one’s competitors as coauthors on a discovery paper is hardly a common practice. ...
In the book [The Double Helix (1968)], Watson mocked Franklin for resisting the idea that the DNA molecule was helical ... There was much truth in this assertion: she had even issued mock memorial invitations to lament the death of the helix hypothesis. ...
Franklin wasn’t sure, even by April 1953, that both forms of DNA visible to crystallographers were helical in structure. Though she knew the famous bases of DNA—designated A, T, G, and C—must be packed inside the helices, she had no idea how they might fit together. Because she refused to build models, she never came close to Watson’s pivotal insight that A always pairs with T, and C with G, forming cross-spiral ladder rungs of equal width. Finally, Franklin had failed to understand a critical feature of her data that was clear to Crick—namely, that DNA belonged to what crystallographers call the space group C2. This means, in brief, that the twin chains of the DNA molecule run in opposite, anti-parallel directions, such that the head of one chain lies against the foot of the other. ..."
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