Rosalind Franklin contributed to the discovery of the structure of DNA
agefotostock / Alamy Stock Photo
Rosalind Franklin should be seen as someone who contributed equally to the elucidation of the DNA structure and not as a victim of theft, two scholars say, Francis Crick and James Watson. claims in an article marking the 70th anniversary of a paper on They say the overlooked letter and draft magazine article add to the evidence that the popular view of Franklin’s role is wrong.
“It takes away her agency,” says Matthew Cobb of the University of Manchester, UK. “That’s not right.”
According to many reports, Franklin, a chemist at King’s College London, did all the hard work to figure out the structure of DNA, but Crick and Watson at Cambridge University did the important X-rays she photographed. Got a line image – Photo 51 – Malicious Person So they can expose the solution in front of her. The idea was derived from Watson’s 1968 book. double helix, but that’s not true, says Cobb. Watson used Photo 51 as a dramatic device.
All the images that came to light were that DNA was helical, and it was already known. Additionally, the image was taken by Franklin graduate student Raymond Gosling and shared to the best of her knowledge with Maurice Wilkins, her director of the biophysics lab assistant to her. Wilkins showed it to Watson.
More important to this discovery than picture 51 was the Medical Research Council (MRC) report containing Franklin’s page on her research. This was given to her Crick by his supervisor, Max Perutz. The data in this her MRC report didn’t reveal the structure to Crick and Watson, but was key to confirming the model, Cobb says.
Cobb and Nathaniel Comfort, a medical historian at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, discovered a previously overlooked 1953 letter to Crick. He invites Crick to a talk by Franklin and Gosling, but Perutz says he already knows more than the talk and Franklin and Gosling don’t think Crick is worth attending. The letter indicates that Franklin knew Peltz shared her findings with Crick, and that worked.
“One of the reasons they’re so relaxed about this is that DNA wasn’t as big a deal as it is now,” Cobb says. Only later did it become clear how important it was.
Cobb and Comfort time Joan Bruce’s magazine, never in print.
Bruce paints a collaborative work. Wilkins and Franklin worked independently of Crick and Watson, but “they collaborated, occasionally reviewing each other’s work and addressing common problems,” she wrote. It’s not clear whose story this is, but the fact that Bruce sent the draft to Franklin for checking suggests that Franklin did talk or communicate with Bruce.
In fact, there is no evidence that Franklin himself felt that he had a hard time. In June 1953 she exhibited a model of her DNA at the Royal Society in London, presenting the structure as a collaborative effort.
Franklin also befriended Crick and his wife and spent time with them while he was ill with the cancer that killed her in 1958. A prize if she’s alive.
The letter and draft article themselves are less dramatic. Rather, they reinforce the claims of alternative versions of history already put forward by others other than Cobb and Comfort.
For example, in 2003, Franklin biographer Brenda Maddox wrote: Nature “The Legend of Franklin, a Mistreated Heroine” “overshadows her intellectual power and independence, both as a scientist and as a person.” At least, Franklin’s story is more complex than myth. is.
topic:
