Revisiting the Legacy of Rosalind Franklin in a Different Light
by Diane Walsh
 Montreal, Canada — DNA is often referred to as the secret of life. If you were inspired to study the complexities of chemistry and biology you’d probably know off the bat to go to the canon of science publications that exist in both print and online.
Scientifically informed people will have heard of Nobel Prize winners—Dr. Francis Crick, Dr. James Watson, and Dr. Maurice Wilkins. As they discovered DNA, right? It makes sense that the subject of DNA exists in the milieu of the world of science. It would, wouldn’t it?
But say, it was suggested there was someone else—also—behind this DNA discovery. Someone of whom you might not have heard, even if you made a point of knowing such things. Even more surprising—someone whose contribution had been knowingly suppressed. Moreover, say someone presented you with the challenge of taking the subject of DNA out of formal scientific discourse and placing it in the field of fine art, for example? Would you be up for it?
Retired McGill Physics Professor Writes Daring Play: “One of These Days”
You might agree when it’s often the case that the more personal stories about the truths behind famous discoveries remain untold. Often famous characters have to die before we learn the truth about their actual contributions. Even then, often bitter secrets never surface. At least not in the mainstream where careers can be ruined by aspersions.
Drama is both a discipline and a medium of communicating the more subtle aspects of the human condition: a space where contentious human struggles can be explored safely. In this vein, accomplished physicist David Walsh has written a play, “One of These Days” He intends it to serve as a dramatic chronicle of what he believes should be considered one of the brilliant chemists of the 20th century—Rosalind Franklin.
However, Franklin died before history had a chance to legitimately review her contribution to science. She should have been and some think still should be credited (along with Crick, Watson and Wilkins) with the Nobel Prize for [her] important contribution to the discovery of the DNA Double-Helix. The argument against this is that there is no such thing as a posthumous Nobel award, nor should there be: Franklin – albeit a female scientist studying DNA extraordinarily in the 1950’s— is no exception, it’s argued.
The play “One of These Days” stands nevertheless as a courageous and intriguing drama about behind-the-scenes competitive politics. Using the dramatic genre, David Walsh tackles delicate truths. He picks up on the growing controversy—the trace—the evidence that’s surfaced—the conversation that’s been opened—that Franklin’s contributions to the discovery of DNA were quite plainly buried.
John Crace, a journalist for the English newspaper The Guardian wrote an article on October 15th, 2007 in which he was seen to be quite successful in drawing out Watson's personality in what was clearly an intense and political interview. In this, we hear Watson, in his own words, compelled to remark on Dr. Rosalind Franklin in a negative way, to the effect that Franklin was "difficult". Here, Watson is heard using language often associated with sexist bias. Unacceptable is his apparent personal difficulty in accepting the professional value of a colleague simply because she’s (gasp) female!
Being able to do so ungrudgingly, without reservation or qualifier, need or compulsion, to say such a person is “difficult,” is an obvious challenge for Watson. Thus stocking the discussion with a gratuitous “Franklin-was-difficult” is nothing but unnecessary “baggage”. It has the effect of minimizing Franklin’s input in the discovery of DNA structure, again deflecting attention away from the contribution she’s actually made to science and the ultimate DNA discovery; ignoring yet again how her work was pivotal and vital to Crick and Watson being able to formulate their 1953 hypothesis of DNA having a double-helix. Without Franklin’s data, who knows what would have happened?
It seems, in Watson’s view, that female scientists start at a professional disadvantage simply because they are not of the same gender as Dr. Watson. His gratuitous comments in light of the fact that Franklin is long dead and thus not around to defend herself has led some onlookers to wonder whether Franklin may have had a foe in Watson—begging the question whether this possibility, in part, may have contributed to Franklin’s never receiving proper credit during her lifetime (1920-1958). That is, credit that wasn’t marginalized in some devious way.
The point to be made here is that Crace's excellent and revealing interview demonstrates that Watson was troubled enough—even to this day—to malign Franklin and negatively characterize her style and presentation.
It so happens that now, however, a more positive presentation of Rosalind Franklin's role in the ultimate discovery of the Double-Helix is available: The play “One of These Days” goes some way to growing the possibility of a more positive conversation in the cultural market place, emphasizing a positive historical revision of Franklin’s contribution. This lends a way of bringing hotly contested issues under the microscope again, setting up a sort of mock storyline to explicate, in some small way, the perhaps still suppressed underlying debates in the scientific community.
The play is intended for a "dramatic" audience. If the play is thought to be a sort of polemic then that's the perspective of another, I suppose; that is to say, the point wouldn't be to take on the playwright himself for making waves but to inspire a movement to reemphasize the whole subject of Franklin's legacy.
The play could be thought of, in effect, as Rosalind Franklin “being heard” long after her death, channeling truth, through a playwright’s literary medium. But David Walsh is the playwright. And rather coincidently, he is both knowledgeable of Franklin’s fields of interest and is himself an accomplished scientist. Moreover, David Walsh’s own colleagues are footnoted in some of the very publications written by Franklin herself. Quite serendipitous, wouldn’t you say? He has this to say on the subject:
"I do think that Rosalind evaluated Watson's real knowledge of DNA structure during a presentation early in the race; so she decided to take them on, and that was my fictional approach; as well as to show that Crick's theoretical role was also vital. Crick's thesis was about another material, which accidently possessed a similar macro-structure without being helical. It meant that DNA was a double helix (Watson said, three, which Franklin knew was wrong from density measurements). However that allowed Crick and Watson to not only get the structure right finally, but also showed how the code is transmitted".
"It's worth noting,” he continued, “that the scientific community, at the time—mainly biologists, chemists and maybe a few physicists who worked in this remote area—laughed at the theory: too simple [they said]! It also took many years of intense research to confirm the details. There are important supporting colleagues, especially Aaron Klug with whom Franklin broke new ground in our understanding of the structure of viruses, where [Franklin] made her real name later”.
He added: “Anne Sayre’s Rosalind Franklin and DNA (1978) has important pertinent information, although it is not an easy read like Maddox. However, Sayre knew Franklin well, and Sayre’s husband had an inside track. Anne's comments about Watson are devastating! Franklin also has an acknowledgement to many scientists for their review before publication, including [McGill scientists] Gabrielle and Jose Donnay, who happened to be very close colleagues of mine”.
So you see there is still much more to be told.
The play, though not unimportant, is accidently playing a useful role now because it brings all these issues back up into the cultural marketplace at a time when the world appears willing to listen. That marketplace will be the better informed today, however, now that many are becoming aware of the “cover-up.” They will be the ones who will judge.
Note that Franklin has yet to receive a formal recommendation from the scientific community to be included as one of four scientists, as opposed to only three (Crick, Watson, and Wilkins), credited for the outcome of the amazing Double-Helix structure being discovered.
The actual performance of the play to a stage—intended for audiences who wouldn’t otherwise be motivated to learn about DNA science – could have the added value of putting the story of Rosalind Franklin’s integrity of character at centre stage.
But you might ask why we should care about this Franklin woman anyway [For details on Franklin’s life, see next page].
Smart people in the scientific community agree that Rosalind Franklin’s legacy is something that needs to be revisited, although this isn’t readily said out loud, for reasons yet to be fully understood. Dr. David Walsh’s play “One of These Days” is one visible example of an attempt at chronicling the buzz through a theatre-drama medium.
WHO IS ROSALIND FRANKLIN?
by Diane Walsh
Rosalind Franklin was born in London England on July 25th 1920. She lived a short but extraordinary life as a keen scientist, both as a biophysicist and X-ray crystallographer in the male-dominated academic setting of the times at King’s College London. Franklin is best known for her work on the X-ray diffraction images of DNA. She was a pioneer in polio-virus research and studying the tobacco mosaic. She died on April 18th 1958 at the early age of 37 of ovarian cancer most likely brought on by exposure to heavy doses of X-rays, at first thousands of times more powerful than modern X-ray technology deems safe.
It’s well known that Franklin served as a sincere and diligent academic during the time scientists Francis Crick and James Watson were equally interested in the fine molecular structures of DNA.
But given that Crick and Watson along with their associate, Wilkins, received Nobel Prizes in 1962—for what was credited to be [their] DNA discovery—it would be no surprise to anyone today; with all the research that’s gone into labour discrimination since the 1950’s, that the subject of Franklin’s contribution should remain hotly debated.
The personalities of the people involved, as well as the back story of how the Double-Helix came to be discovered, remain timelessly relevant to sociologists and historians for reasons easy to understand. It is the writers Robert Olby publishing The Path to the Double Helix: Discovery of DNA (1974) and Brenda Maddox publishing Rosalind Franklin: the Dark Lady of DNA (2002) who have aimed the spotlight and helped to supply information about original source materials. In turn this has inspired others to take up the study of Franklin’s vital contribution.
Francis Crick stated—in his own words— in a letter dated December 31st 1961 to Jacques Monod at Pasteur Institute that, “the data which really helped us to obtain the structure was mainly obtained by Rosalind Franklin”. To view letter: http://profiles.nlm.nih.gov/SC/B/B/F/W/_/scbbfw.pdf
In fact, there is no dispute that it was Franklin’s data that was used to formulate Crick/Watsons’ 1953 hypothesis regarding the structure of DNA. Nonetheless, full credit for and to Franklin’s contribution was never given. When the ground-breaking scientific advancement was first published in the publication Nature; Franklin appeared as a footnote, and her work, along with Wilkins’ was cited as “unpublished”.
Franklin’s own article appeared third in a sequence of three articles in the famous Nature edition.
However, it’s reported that Crick did try to contact the publication. It’s been maintained that it was the publication that made the decision one way or another regarding the “primacy” of Franklin’s material – although this part of the story is still in debate.
Interestingly Crick’s actual letter to Monod in 1961 was discovered in the Archives of the Pasteur Institute by Doris Zeller much later—and reprinted in Nature Correspondence 425, 15 on 4 September 2003 only 6 years ago.
Watson was shown to be quite motivated to be seen confirming Crick’s opinion [from that letter] but only years after the fact – 42 years, in fact, after Franklin’s death in 2000 Watson spoke on Franklin’s contribution—at the opening of the King’s College Franklin-Wilkins building.
The curious surfacing of the letter leads one to wonder if, perhaps, Watson was in a way forced to acknowledge Franklin in a more major way than he had previously. Not because he was suddenly inspired to do “justice” to the Franklin legacy on his own volition but because the contemporaneous Crick-Monod correspondence was to be visible in the scientific community.
Wilkins had already received the Nobel Prize (in 1962) along with Crick and Watson; in addition, he was being honoured in 2000 by the opening of the Franklin-Wilkins Building. It wasn’t the unveiling of the Franklin Building but the Franklin-Wilkins Building. No Nobel Prize for Franklin. In 1962 she was dead. Granted, Wilkins did a lot of painstaking work, as the 31 Dec 1961 Crick letter clearly reveals.
However the notion of Franklin having played an extraordinarily vital role in the DNA discovery has yet to be endorsed in any great way in the scientific community, even to this day. The topic has been taken up for the most part by Franklin’s friends and admirers. Watson’s book, The Double Helix (1980) is his personal account of the events in question. Although he acknowledges the influence and help of Franklin’s data, he goes to great pains to suggest that she didn’t understand her own data—which, not surprisingly, would be an infuriating characterization from Franklin’s point of view.
It is Dr. Rosalind Franklin’s point of view which is of interest to the many newcomers to the story, in 2009.
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Diane Walsh is an independent investigative journalist based in Canada.
Email: mediageode@gmail.com
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