Several journals and newspapers recently have reviewed the following book
which reveals that Watson, Crick and Wilkins, who received the Nobel Prize
for "unravelling the mysteries of the genetic code", indulged in some rather
underhand and unprofessional behaviour in which they "borrowed" extensively
from the work of a bright young woman scientist by the name of Rosalind
Franklin.

The following review was published in the Scientific American:

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<http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?articleID=000841A3-982D-1DC9-AF71809EC588EED

F&catID=2>

The Twisted Road to the Double Helix

Rosalind Franklin's stunningly clear x-ray photographs elucidated the
structure of DNA, but her contribution was ignored at the time

By Dean H. Hamer

The aphorism "history is always written by the victors" is as true for
science as for geopolitics. Certainly it was the case for the discovery in
1953 of the double helical structure of DNA, the most important discovery in
20th-century biology. The victors were James Watson and Francis Crick, who
together with Maurice Wilkins shared the 1962 Nobel Prize for crossing the
finish line first. The loser was Rosalind Franklin, who produced the x-ray
data that most strongly supported the structure but was not properly
acknowledged for her contributions.

According to Watson's best-selling 1968 account of the great race, The Double
Helix, Franklin was not even a contender, much less a major contributor. He
painted her as a mere assistant to Wilkins who "had to go or be put in her
place" because she had the audacity to think she might be able to work on DNA
on her own. Worse yet, she "did not emphasize her feminine qualities,"
lamented Watson, who refers to her only as "Rosy." "The thought could not be
avoided," he concluded, "that the best home for a feminist was in another
person's lab."

Franklin never had a chance to respond; she died of ovarian cancer in 1958.
Her good friend Anne Sayre did offer a rebuttal in Rosalind Franklin and DNA,
but that biography is too polemical and pedantic to be either persuasive or a
good read.

Now, just in time for the 50th anniversary of the double helix, noted British
biographer Brenda Maddox has produced a more balanced, nuanced and informed
version of the tale. Rosalind Franklin: The Dark Lady of DNA is neither a
paean to Franklin nor a condemnation of her competitors. It's simply the
story of a scientist's life as gleaned from extensive correspondence,
published and unpublished manuscripts, laboratory notebooks, and interviews
with many of the protagonists.

It was an interesting life. Franklin, the daughter of a prominent Jewish
family, was an "alarmingly clever" girl who spent her free time doing
arithmetic for pleasure. She was educated at a series of academically
rigorous schools culminating in the University of Cambridge, where, despite
the fact that women were still excluded from receiving an undergraduate
degree, she managed a Ph.D. in physical chemistry and developed the
experimental style that was to characterize all her subsequent work-- an
approach that was meticulous, albeit sometimes overly cautious.

Then it was off to Paris, where she applied the new techniques of x-ray
diffraction to the structure of coal. In France, Franklin bloomed both as a
scientist, authoring numerous independent publications, and as a young woman
free from the constraints of family and stuffy British society. It was a
happy and productive period, as were her final years at Birkbeck College in
London, where she collaborated with Aaron Klug on the structure of the
tobacco mosaic virus.

Alas, the central and most important two years of her career were spent in
the far less hospitable environment of the biophysics unit at King's College
London. There she immediately locked horns with Wilkins over who would get to
study the structure of DNA-- a subject that had been largely ignored during
World War II, with its emphasis on more practical matters, but was
increasingly regarded as the problem in structural biology. Wilkins, who had
been researching the matter for years, had seniority but little insight or
good data. It was Franklin, a newcomer to biology, who made the critical
observation that DNA exists in two distinct forms, A and B, and produced the
sharpest pictures of both. They reached a compromise that Franklin would work
on the A form and Wilkins on the B and went their separate ways.

Or so Franklin thought. In fact, Wilkins, in a weekend visit to Cambridge,
spilled the King's beans to Watson and Crick, who soon thereafter began the
model building. Although their approach was less meticulous than Franklin's,
it was also far quicker. A few months later it was Watson's turn to visit
London, where Wilkins showed him Franklin's startlingly clear x-ray
photograph of the B form. On the train back to Cambridge, Watson drew the
pattern from memory on the margin of his newspaper. Yet just two months
later, in their historic letter to Nature, he and Crick claimed, "We were not
aware of the details of the results presented [in accompanying papers from
Franklin's and Wilkins's groups] ... when we devised our structure."

How did Watson and Crick, with the complicity of Wilkins, get away with so
brazenly heisting "Rosy's" data? Maddox offers several theories. The most
obvious is Franklin's position as a female researcher at an institution where
women were still not allowed to set foot in the senior common room. There was
also the matter of anti-Semitism. Franklin's family may have anglicized their
name, but her uncle was the first High Commissioner of Palestine, and she was
active in Jewish relief groups. She felt isolated, even ostracized, in a
school where theology was the largest department and "there were swirling
cassocks and dog collars everywhere."

We'll probably never know the full story, but Maddox's book shines new light
on one of the key characters in the tale of the double helix. Rosalind
Franklin may not have had the intuition of some of her competitors, but what
she did possess was equally important: integrity....

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Dr Mel C Siff
Denver, USA
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Supertraining/