Lost Letters Show Erasure Of DNA Heroine
Previously unknown letters from two Nobelists reveal shameful new details of the campaign to minimize Rosalind Franklin's role in finding DNA's structure.
History’s worst robbery of female scientific credit took place 70 years ago next month. Through months of delicate work and dangerous radiation exposure, Rosalind Franklin had made X-ray diffraction pictures of DNA that were critical to the solution of the molecule’s double-helix structure by Francis Crick and James Watson.
But the famous Watson-Crick paper, prepared in March 1953 and published the next month in the science journal Nature, buried her name in the acknowledgements — after those of two other male scientists making smaller contributions.
Franklin is “the canonical example” of a woman’s scientific achievement being minimized or ignored, wrote public policy scholars Matthew Ross, Britta Glennon and colleagues in a paper published last year, also in Nature. Analyzing grant payroll records and authorship credit on more than 40,000 scientific papers and patents, they found the problem is widespread and systematic.
Authorship denial was the worst of multiple indignities — the kind known by women in labs everywhere — directed at Franklin. Starting with her arrival at London’s King’s College to study DNA in 1951, male collaborators slighted, marginalized and, behind the scenes, insulted her.
Vivid new evidence for all this emerged last month. On Jan. 27 Christie’s closed an auction of 22 previously unknown letters (starts at Lot 117) from Crick and Maurice Wilkins, both awarded the 1962 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, along with Watson, for cracking DNA.
Wilkins was Franklin’s colleague at King’s, also working on DNA crystallography. Watson and Crick, at the University of Cambridge, were trying to solve the structure without doing their own experiments. The newly surfaced letters, unnoted so far (Feb. 8) by news outlets or historians, had been sent to Leonard Hamilton, a British scientist and source of experimental DNA who died in 2019.
All cast fresh light on the drama of discovery and jostling for accolades, best related in the forensically detailed and compulsively readable The Secret of Life, by Howard Markel, published in 2021. Four letters mention Franklin, adding ugly new details of the efforts to sideline and belittle her.
"The X-ray data which Jim and I used was almost entirely Rosalind Franklin’s measurements of the dimensions of the two forms, A and B,” Crick says to Hamilton on Dec. 6, 1955.
Written less than three years after the discovery, this is an early and clear admission of the debt that Crick and Watson owed Franklin.
They had obtained key parts of her unpublished data through back channels. But in their landmark Nature paper, seeking to grab the laurels, they fibbed, saying they were “not aware of the details” of Franklin’s results and had relied on theory and published science.
In 1954, in a paper in the Proceedings of the Royal Society, the two did have the grace to admit that, without the King’s data, “the formulation of our structure would have been most unlikely.” But it wasn’t until decades later that Crick would publicly and particularly praise Franklin the way he does in this letter.
Wilkins, who wrote seven of the newly available documents, is nasty. In a May 21, 1957 letter to a colleague he calls Franklin a “silly bitch.”
This is four years after the DNA breakthrough. He is suggesting to his correspondent that Franklin be mentioned in a forthcoming paper just enough for courtesy but not so much as to make it seem she was central to the grand discovery. Here is the passage:
In any place which doesn’t give the briefest reference to X ray work I suggest you mention Franklin’s name too, e.g. Wilkins & coworkers & Miss Franklin. Mind you the silly bitch botched the whole business so effectively that I don’t think she should be mentioned too often but she did make very useful contributions (as well as sabotage) & as her papers get frequent reference it would look odd not to have her name in somewhere.
This letter, striking new evidence for what Markel calls the “conspiracy” against Franklin, fetched $327,600 — the highest price of the bunch and 60 times Christie’s pre-auction estimate.
“Bitch,” even more poisonous then than it is now, joins what Alexander Gann and Jan Witkowski, publishing in Nature in 2010, called “the canon of well-known allusions” to Franklin. (They were writing about another cache of letters, newly found at the time, in which Wilkins associated Franklin with “the smoke of witchcraft.”)
Others include “dark lady” from Wilkins and “loser” from Watson, whose famous 1968 memoir, The Double Helix, portrayed Franklin as unfeminine and stubborn and stated, “the thought could not be avoided that the best home for a feminist was in another person’s lab.”
“Sabotage” in the new letter presumably refers to the myth that Franklin insisted to the end that DNA was not helical and the fact that she did not share data with Wilkins. But Wilkins wasn’t her boss (another myth). And she had known for months that one of the DNA forms — the high-humidity version captured in her famous Photograph No. 51 — was a helix, Markel shows.
It was Franklin who was sabotaged. Three times her pivotal results were shared by male scientists with other male scientists without her permission and behind her back — once when a PhD student gave Wilkins the picture, once when Wilkins showed it to Watson and again when a grant administrator showed a summary of her work to Crick.
As soon as Watson saw Photograph No. 51 “my mouth fell open and my pulse began to race,” he wrote later, because the patterns of scattered X-rays shouted helix. The Medical Research Council report set off “a chain reaction” of insights in Crick’s brain, Markel writes.
The leaks gave essential clues to the structure — a spiraling stairway of nitrogenous bases holding the recipes for proteins and life — that the two never would have gotten on their own.
“We have got rid of the young woman who was monopolizing much of our data & swearing it wasn’t a helix,” Wilkins writes in another newly revealed letter, dated March 19 and 20, 1953.
Wilkins and Franklin had never gotten along. Brusque and impatient with lesser intellects, Franklin put Wilkins through “emotional hell,” Watson wrote in The Double Helix. But the torture was mutual. Wilkins had difficulties dealing with women and had spent time in Freudian analysis.
Franklin was so miserable at King’s that, by the time of the Watson-Crick bombshell, she had opted to go to the less-prestigious Birkbeck College across town.
In the same letter Wilkins shows his chagrin and resentment at having been beat to the DNA finish line by what looked like a sneaky shortcut. He and Franklin were about to publish their X-ray results in a less-celebrated paper in the same issue of Nature.
But it is an absolute Rat Race. Francis is being by no means ethical about it all[,] using all the data and ideas he & Jim have got from here & then maintaining he has done it all by pure reason. But keep that to yourself.
The 1953 discovery heralds the manipulation of life and evolution and, probably, eventually, the creation of designer humans. Historians will study and quote these letters for centuries.
“We have the hell of a lot of data on DNA but not very much idea just now what it means…,” Wilkins writes on Feb. 28, 1953. (That same day a final, critical brainwave hit Watson in Cambridge revealing exactly what it meant.)
“Life is hell” with excited journalists and importuning administrators bothering him, Wilkins writes in April. In June Crick describes Watson as “very bright” and relates flipping a coin with him for first-authorship credit on a paper. (Watson won.)
The most important parts of the trove, as shown by the prices, are the Franklin-related letters and what they add to her legend. (I guess they were bought by the Churchill Archives Centre or the Wellcome Collection, both of which house big DNA-discovery archives. If they get back to me I’ll update.)
(Update Feb. 9: Wellcome says it was not the buyer. Amy Chapman, communications manager at Churchill College, Cambridge, says: “Regrettably, on this occasion, the Archives Centre was not the buyer, though naturally we wish we had these letters.”)
Perhaps Franklin would have won a well-merited Nobel in 1962 along with Watson, Crick and Wilkins. But she died at 37 in 1958 of ovarian cancer very possibly caused by the X-rays. People can’t receive Nobels posthumously.
In any event, thanks to the conspiracy, her contribution was completely unknown at the time. Her New York Times obituary called her a “virus researcher” and didn’t mention DNA.
Francis Bacon, the 17th-century founder of modern, experimental science, argued that truth emerges best from discoveries that are “properly and regularly abstracted from particulars” of reality rather than through untethered reason. Without Franklin’s experimental particulars, derived at great cost, from real DNA molecules of real calf thymus glands, nobody would have heard of Watson and Crick.