Frank Ryan's Blog - Posts Tagged "rosalind-franklin"
New Look at the Rosalind Franklin Story
Much of the furore about the tragic scientist, Rosalind Franklin, was generated by a biography by a friend and journalist after her death. New information - as explained in The Mysterious World of the Human Genome - suggests that this was somewhat misleading. While it is true that Franklin made an important contribution to the discovery of the stereochemical structure of DNA, it now seems unlikely she would have shared the Nobel Prize for this discovery had she not died from cancer before the award.
In particular, the contribution of Maurice Wilkins, who did share the Nobel Prize with Watson and Crick, was grossly and inaccurately downplayed, as was the contribution of graduate student, Raymond Gosling.
Wilkins makes clear in his belated biography, published in 2003 just a year before his death, the X-ray photograph that Watson crowed about was not stolen from Franklin but was passed to him by Gosling, who had taken the photograph in the first place, and who would have assumed, at a time that Franklin was leaving, that she could have no objection to his doing so. Gosling still needed to complete his PhD thesis without the departing Franklin’s supervision, had every reason to show his own work to the Deputy Director of the Unit, who would now be tutoring him. Gosling himself would confirm that . . . ‘Maurice had a perfect right to that information.’ Gosling was clearly fed up with the rancour provoked by Franklin’s refusal to collaborate with Wilkins, bemoaning a time when . . . ‘There was so much going on at King’s before Rosalind came.’
At the time Franklin was preparing to leave King’s College to join the staff at the Biomolecular Research Laboratory, at Birkbeck College, London, there to work under the directorship of JD Bernal. To her credit, in her two years at King’s she had made a series of original discoveries about DNA, including the fact that DNA existed in two different forms, which she had labelled A and B; how readily one form could turn into the other; hard proof that the phosphate spine was on the outside, and thus readily exposed to take up water molecules, which wrapped the molecule in a protective sheath within the nuclear environment, keeping it relatively free from the interaction of neighbouring molecules, meanwhile making stretching of the molecule easier.
Once ensconced at Birkbeck, Franklin appears to have settled into a fruitful, and amicable working routine with her boss, Bernal, and a graduate student, Aaron Klug. Here she ceased to work on DNA fibres to focus on the molecular probing of viruses, producing some of her finest work. On her tragic and untimely death, when she would leave her worldly possessions to Klug and his family, her scientific obituary would be admiringly and respectfully written by Bernal in The Times and the scientific journal, Nature.
It is far more likely, in my opinion, that she would have both merited and shared the Nobel Prize awarded to Klug after her death for her work on viruses.
In particular, the contribution of Maurice Wilkins, who did share the Nobel Prize with Watson and Crick, was grossly and inaccurately downplayed, as was the contribution of graduate student, Raymond Gosling.
Wilkins makes clear in his belated biography, published in 2003 just a year before his death, the X-ray photograph that Watson crowed about was not stolen from Franklin but was passed to him by Gosling, who had taken the photograph in the first place, and who would have assumed, at a time that Franklin was leaving, that she could have no objection to his doing so. Gosling still needed to complete his PhD thesis without the departing Franklin’s supervision, had every reason to show his own work to the Deputy Director of the Unit, who would now be tutoring him. Gosling himself would confirm that . . . ‘Maurice had a perfect right to that information.’ Gosling was clearly fed up with the rancour provoked by Franklin’s refusal to collaborate with Wilkins, bemoaning a time when . . . ‘There was so much going on at King’s before Rosalind came.’
At the time Franklin was preparing to leave King’s College to join the staff at the Biomolecular Research Laboratory, at Birkbeck College, London, there to work under the directorship of JD Bernal. To her credit, in her two years at King’s she had made a series of original discoveries about DNA, including the fact that DNA existed in two different forms, which she had labelled A and B; how readily one form could turn into the other; hard proof that the phosphate spine was on the outside, and thus readily exposed to take up water molecules, which wrapped the molecule in a protective sheath within the nuclear environment, keeping it relatively free from the interaction of neighbouring molecules, meanwhile making stretching of the molecule easier.
Once ensconced at Birkbeck, Franklin appears to have settled into a fruitful, and amicable working routine with her boss, Bernal, and a graduate student, Aaron Klug. Here she ceased to work on DNA fibres to focus on the molecular probing of viruses, producing some of her finest work. On her tragic and untimely death, when she would leave her worldly possessions to Klug and his family, her scientific obituary would be admiringly and respectfully written by Bernal in The Times and the scientific journal, Nature.
It is far more likely, in my opinion, that she would have both merited and shared the Nobel Prize awarded to Klug after her death for her work on viruses.
