Was DNA pioneer Rosalind Franklin really a victim of scientific theft?

Rosalind Franklin should be seen as an equal contributor to solving the structure of DNA, and not as a victim of theft, a pair of academics argue in an article to mark the 70th anniversary of Francis Crick and James Watson’s paper on the structure of DNA. They say an overlooked letter and a draft magazine article add to the evidence that the popular view of Franklin’s role is wrong.

“It deprives her of her agency,” says Matthew Cobb at the University of Manchester, UK. “That’s not right.”

According to many accounts, Franklin, a chemist at King’s College London, did all the hard work to elucidate DNA’s structure, but Crick and Watson at the University of Cambridge got hold of a key X-ray image she took – Photograph 51 – by nefarious means, allowing them to publish the solution before her. This idea derives from Watson’s 1968 book The Double Helix, but it isn’t true, says Cobb. Watson used Photo 51 as a dramatic device.

All the image revealed is that DNA is helical, which was already known. What’s more, the image was taken by Franklin’s graduate student Raymond Gosling, who shared it with Maurice Wilkins, the assistant director of the biophysics lab, with her knowledge. Wilkins then showed it to Watson.

More important to the discovery than Photo 51 was a Medical Research Council (MRC) report that included a page from Franklin on her work. This was given to Crick by his supervisor, Max Perutz. The data in this MRC report didn’t reveal the structure to Crick and Watson, but was key to confirming their model, says Cobb.

Cobb and Nathaniel Comfort, a historian of medicine at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, have found a previously overlooked 1953 letter to Crick by a researcher called Pauline Cowan. It invites Crick to a talk by Franklin and Gosling, but says that since Perutz already knows more than might be in the lecture, Franklin and Gosling think it might not be worthwhile for Crick to attend. The letter shows that Franklin knew Perutz was sharing her findings with Crick and seemed fine with it.

“One of the reasons why they are so relaxed about this is that DNA was not the big deal it is now,” says Cobb. It only later became clear how important it is.

Cobb and Comfort have also found a 1953 draft article for Time magazine by Joan Bruce that never appeared in print.

Bruce portrays a collaborative effort. She writes that although Wilkins and Franklin worked independently from Crick and Watson, “they linked up, confirming each other’s work from time to time, or wrestling over a common problem”. It isn’t clear whose version of the story this is, but the fact that Bruce sent the draft to Franklin for checking suggests that Franklin had talked or corresponded with Bruce.

Indeed, there is no evidence that Franklin herself felt hard done by. In June 1953, she exhibited a model of DNA at the Royal Society in London, presenting the structure as a joint effort.

Franklin also became friends with Crick and his wife, spending time with them while ill with the cancer that killed her in 1958. Between 1953 and her death, she did groundbreaking work on viral structure that, by itself, might well have won her a Nobel prize had she lived.

The letter and draft article aren’t that dramatic in themselves. Rather, they strengthen the case for an alternative version of history that others besides Cobb and Comfort have already put forward.

In 2003, for instance, Franklin’s biographer Brenda Maddox wrote in Nature that “the legend of Franklin, the wronged heroine” has “overshadowed her intellectual strength and independence both as a scientist and as an individual”. At the very least, Franklin’s story is more complex than the myth.