> “Jim [James Watson] now holds the view that women can’t be great at anything,” and certainly not science.
Watson and Crick are notorious for having secretly accessed
and used Rosalind Elsie Franklin's personal x-ray images (of DNA) while she was not in the lab.
To me, Franklin is the real hero in discovering the DNA's structure, and she should have received
the Nobel prize (50%), perhaps jointly with Watson (25%) and Crick (25%).
Objective scientific research means: never let your personal prejudice or ideology clout your own search for truth. The fact that Watson and Crick did not even mention or cite Franklin's article, which ironically even appeared in the same issue of _Nature_ as Watson and Crick's paper, is most dishonorable and dishonest.
Franklin didn't have the tools and process for determining the structure of DNA, only Watson and Crick did, because they used actual physical models to measure the angles and positions of the molecular components.
Further, by the time Watson and Crick did their work, Franklin had already left to work on the tobacco mosaic virus (TMV)[0].
That Watson and Crick could only nail the structure of DNA because of her crystallography work is almost certain. That she would have discovered the structure of DNA without them and their process/approach is a furphy[1]. It's their combined efforts which made it possible, with Franklin's work being the pointer in the right direction and confirmation, but Watson and Crick's being the bulk of the heavy-lifting necessary to map the molecule structure.
In the end, she probably didn't share in the Nobel because she died before the prize was awarded for the research.
jll29•2h ago
Watson and Crick are notorious for having secretly accessed and used Rosalind Elsie Franklin's personal x-ray images (of DNA) while she was not in the lab.
To me, Franklin is the real hero in discovering the DNA's structure, and she should have received the Nobel prize (50%), perhaps jointly with Watson (25%) and Crick (25%).
Objective scientific research means: never let your personal prejudice or ideology clout your own search for truth. The fact that Watson and Crick did not even mention or cite Franklin's article, which ironically even appeared in the same issue of _Nature_ as Watson and Crick's paper, is most dishonorable and dishonest.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosalind_Franklin
conz•1h ago
Franklin didn't have the tools and process for determining the structure of DNA, only Watson and Crick did, because they used actual physical models to measure the angles and positions of the molecular components.
Further, by the time Watson and Crick did their work, Franklin had already left to work on the tobacco mosaic virus (TMV)[0].
That Watson and Crick could only nail the structure of DNA because of her crystallography work is almost certain. That she would have discovered the structure of DNA without them and their process/approach is a furphy[1]. It's their combined efforts which made it possible, with Franklin's work being the pointer in the right direction and confirmation, but Watson and Crick's being the bulk of the heavy-lifting necessary to map the molecule structure.
In the end, she probably didn't share in the Nobel because she died before the prize was awarded for the research.
[0] https://www.cinz.nz/posts/rosalind-elsie-franklin-1920-1958 [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Furphy