ROSALIND FRANKLIN - The ‘so-called’ Dark Lady of DNA

“The mills of God grind slowly, yet they grind exceeding small; Though with patience He stands waiting, with exactness He grinds all.”

wrote Longfellow in his ‘Retribution’.

Petronius says it more succinctly:

"Vengeance may be delayed but it comes when least expected".

50 years ago, Rosalind Franklin, scientific genius, died at the age of 37. She was killed by a cancer brought on in the early 1950s when she conducted x-ray experiments on the nucleic acids.


Over 50 years ago, James Watson and Francis Crick published their brief but epoch-making paper Molecular Structure of Nucleic Acids in the scientific journal Nature. In a flash, it created modern, molecular genetics: their model of the structure of DNA allowed us to understand the chemical mechanism of Mendel's law of inheritance.


They were soon graced with the Nobel Prize. They had won a race and, with it, immortality. But it was an ignoble, duplicitous victory, one that Watson gloated about some years later in his account of the discovery, 'The Double Helix'.



One reviewer of that solipsistic book wrote:

"This is a saddening book, for it reminds us of that which we would rather forget - that, in Homo sapiens, brilliance need not be coupled with compassion, nor ambition with concern." The reviewer went on to lament that its reader would learn that scientific endeavour was "a clawing climb up a slippery slope, impeded by the authority of fools ... with malice towards most and with charity for none".

Or the quote by an Australian scientist after the author had given a lecture there: "If that's Watson, then Crick really must have a brain."


Rosalind Franklin was one of several brilliant scientists without whom Watson and Crick could never have succeeded. She was as much their antithesis as it was possible to be: but its also admirably clear that Franklin possessed tremendous personal and professional integrity, great laboratory diligence and skill, intellectual rigour and distaste for personal aggrandisement or scientific overstatement.


What is also apparent is how few of Franklin's English (as opposed to European) male colleagues recognised those qualities: she had the effrontery - as a woman - to match or exceed the quality of their work. To add to her 'dark lady' persona, consider Franklin's affluent Jewish family background with its important financial, political and publishing involvements which adds even more interest to Franklin's complex character: Jewish, female and a thoroughgoing European whose happiest scientific years were spent in Paris.


It is true that this woman - formidably intelligent, emotionally shackled - had a tendency to be 'prickly'. We've all met people like that, except that in Franklin's case the sense of self-worth was wholly warranted. In any case, nothing in her personality remotely justified the way she was plagiarised and calumniated.


The first to have treated her badly was the eminent Professor John Randall, of King's College, London, who, in enticing her back from France to work with his team in London, clearly misled her about what her working relationship would be with the austere New Zealander Maurice Wilkins. DNA research was his field, and new to Franklin - Wilkins therefore clearly saw her as intruding on his territory and (falsely so) as his subordinate. Wilkins soon drew solace from his developing association with fellow researchers Crick and Watson, and was none too scrupulous in divulging her experimental results to them, information which he acquired through a shared PhD student.


Another fly in this distasteful ointment was the much-liked Austrian refugee Max Perutz, another future Nobel laureate and member of Lawrence Bragg's renowned Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge, which was the real rival to King's College.


As a member of a team of experts assembled by the Medical Research Council to assess work being undertaken at King's, Perutz obtained and divulged to Watson and Crick privileged and unpublished results - principally Franklin's - which gave them the crucial quantitative information they needed to build their physical model of the DNA molecule.

Perutz later tried hard to excuse himself - "I was inexperienced and casual in administrative matters" - but it is an inescapable fact that he was a party to the misappropriation of Franklin's material.


The real villains, however, were Watson and Crick. Their legendary paper in Nature contained a blatant and self-serving lie:

"We have also been stimulated by a knowledge of the general nature of the unpublished experimental results and ideas of ... Dr R.E. Franklin ..."

Nothing, then or now, can justify that statement: they obtained her very specific data in an underhand way. These days I'd call it intellectual theft. Beside this, Watson's sneers and disparagement of Franklin as a scientist and a woman in The Double Helix are as nothing.


What's needed is an inspiring rehabilitation of the besmirched reputation of an extraordinary scientist (based on Watson's implausibly febrile account of his fear of her physical violence - she was half his size - for example, or his ridicule of her appearance and dress sense), nor merely a gripping reminder of an earlier scientific era (when, as fellow members of the Athenaeum Club in London, it was possible for Randall and the editor of Nature to effect a gentlemen's agreement to have King's research work appear in what was going to be a momentous occasion, the publication of the legendary April 25 issue).


It is also a clarion call for reform of the Nobel Prize rules, with their limits on the numbers of winners allowed for each prize (in this case, that it be shared between no more than three recipients) and the disqualification of the dead (Rosalind Franklin died, aged only 37, in 1958. Watson, Crick and Wilkins received the Nobel Prize in 1962).


Even more, we need to remember that scientists are not saints, that they will fight for success and fame, as well as money. They will at times denigrate their rivals and, alas, they will sometimes lie.


The last word should be with the pioneer crystallographer J.D. Bernal, Franklin's obituarist in The Times after her death from ovarian cancer: "Her life is an example of single-minded devotion to scientific research."


Now, may the Mills of God grind forth justice.


Resources:
NOVA - PBS

Race for The Double Helix (Life Story)- BBC - from C. Zanta
Who Discovered DNA? by Heather Kane

Rosalind Franklin: The Dark Lady of DNA by Brenda Maddox reviewed by Robin Marantz Henig in The New York Times