So why did she not publish her findings immediately? History waits for no one (not even women)! Publish or perish! Making a discovery is one thing, communicating the discovery is another!
Did Ms. Franklin talk to Mr. Watson about her discovery?
How many times have similar things happened to male lab technicians?
Another nice attempt to show that a woman actually made a major discovery before any men? Or behind every great man was a woman?
"... Rosalind Franklin, an x-ray crystallographer at King’s College London, had produced the image days earlier in 1952. But Watson’s 1968 book implied the flash of insight was his alone.
Watson’s slight took hold partly because Franklin’s lab notes, usually thorough and meticulous, said little about photograph 51. But in a new paper in the Journal of the History of Biology, Sponsel and Sutton draw attention to an earlier image, photograph 49. Franklin’s notes on that image show she recognized the helical structure and calculated, for the first time, the length of each turn—34 angstroms—and the number of bases “per turn of helix (if there is a helix).” ..."
From the abstract:
"This essay, co-authored by a historian of science and an X-ray crystallographer, sheds new light on Rosalind Franklin’s Photograph 51. We refute the infamous claim that, unlike James Watson, Franklin failed to see the picture’s potential significance for interpreting the helical structure of DNA.
Rather, Franklin decided to take Photograph 51 precisely because she knew that key parameters of DNA’s B form helix could be calculated from the resulting image.
We show that she had in fact already made those calculations — on her earlier Photograph 49 — and she reused the same DNA sample for Photograph 51 to create a better-centered but otherwise identical diffraction image that would be suitable for publication. Thus Photograph 51 was not the result of an experiment in need of analysis, but was refined documentation for calculations that she had already performed on the earlier photograph. We argue that colleagues and later commentators did not merely overlook Franklin’s original reason for creating the strikingly clear and informative Photograph 51, they rhetorically erased her skill and judgment by describing it as though nature spoke for itself through the image — and to Watson, but not to Franklin."
Photograph 49 is the Key to Understanding the History of Rosalind Franklin’s DNA Photograph 51 (open access)
Rosalind Franklin’s photograph 51 (right) revealed DNA’s helical structure. But she had already recognized it in an earlier, flawed image: photograph 49 (left).
Rosalind Franklin
