Rosalind Franklin: The True DNA Discoverer?

Rosalind Franklin was a famous chemist whose research and discovery work in the 1950s led to the comprehension of the structure of DNA. There was a lot of controversy surrounding the discovery of the structure and who should receive credit for "the double helix." In 1962, four years after Franklin's death at the age of 37, three other chemists, James Watson, Francis Crick, and Maurice Wilkins received a Nobel Prize for the double helix model of DNA. How did the other chemists beat her to it and was Rosalind Franklin cheated out of the Nobel Prize?

Franklin was born in 1920, and by the age of 15 she already knew she was going to be a scientist. Franklin went to Newnham College in 1938 and then Cambridge University in 1945. After graduating from Cambridge, Franklin spent three years in Paris learning X-ray diffraction techniques. In 1951, she went to work at King's College as a research associate for John Randall. There, her and Maurice Wilkins worked as peers although Wilkins misunderstood Franklin's role and treated her as an assistant. It was at King's College that Randall gave Franklin the task of explaining the structure of DNA.

To determine the structure of DNA, Franklin used a technique called X-ray crystallography. This allowed the location of atoms in any crystal to be mapped by looking at the image of the crystal under an X-ray beam. By using this technique, Franklin produced the clearest X-ray images of crystallized DNA ever. From these X-rays, Franklin determined that DNA's structure depended on an external backbone, with bases inside and identified the location of the phosphate sugars. After making this breakthrough, Randall presented Franklin's data and unpublished conclusions at a routine seminar. What occurred after this seminar is where the story becomes a controversy.

Some sources say that Franklin could never quite interpret the images she created and refused to share or work with others to analyze them. Because she refused to share the images, it was said that Watson and Crick were forced to go around Franklin to get at her data. When they studied the data they gathered from Franklin's researches, they built up a detailed and correct description of DNA's structure and were ultimately given credit for it. However on the other side, other sources say that Franklin was completely capable of interpreting and explaining the X-ray images. She may have been a bit slow in describing the double helix model because the structure was hard to see. These sources say that after the seminar, Franklin's work was wrongly and unknowingly shared with Watson and Crick. Franklin did not give permission and was not acknowledged for the work that she did leading to the discoveries.

Watson did go to the seminar in 1951 and was overconfident in believing he could remember what he needed. This time though, he could not remember most of the seminar because he was not familiar with enough of the words related to crystallography. An important part understanding the structure was the amount of water present in Franklin's DNA samples. Watson thought he remembered this number but was incorrect by a lot. After creating a model they thought to be correct and assuming that DNA was a triple helix, Watson and Crick found out that they were completely wrong, and the number "remembered" was actually 10 times the actual amount. The structure they came up with was impossible. For a while, Watson and Crick dropped the project and worked on other things. Later however, after reviewing the work of yet another scientist, Watson finally realized the mistake. He and Crick later went on, with the help of Franklin's X-rays, to finally complete the detailed description of DNA structure.

The true version of the story lies somewhere between the stories of many sources but the ending is the same for each one. Watson and Crick pulled ahead in the race and ultimately published proposed structure of DNA in March of 1953. The rest of the world learned about the double helix in a letter to the science journal Nature on April 25, 1953. When Watson and Crick made their announcement, Franklin accepted defeat graciously and when encountering Watson and Crick later in life, they met as friends. Franklin may have not known that her X-rays played such a central role in their discovery.

Franklin went on to the University of London where she studied the structures of viruses. While studying there, she met Aaron Klug, a crystallographer with whom Franklin ended up doing the best work of her career. During the next five years, Franklin published 17 papers. The discoveries made in those five years by Franklin and her group laid the foundation for structural virology.

While on a visit to the United States, Franklin had tremendous pains that came and went, and soon learned it was ovarian cancer. She worked for the next two years through three operations and a ten month remission. She kept working until a few weeks before she died in 1958 at age 37. Franklin was quite a hard worker and was constantly focused on her studies. She was a great scientist who deserved all the credit given to a team that took the wrong path to success. Franklin took it in stride, quite surprisingly against her character, maybe never realizing what she had done for the future of science.

Franklin was certainly cheated out of a Nobel Prize by Watson and Crick; however she was not cheated out of advancing science and helping make many discoveries that continue to be built off of and used to advance technology and further our knowledge in science. Would she have been given credit had she been alive when the award was presented? Or would she be looking on as two undeserving gentlemen received a prize they knew was not meant for them? The answer will remain unknown but her work remains behind and is greatly appreciated today.