As part of James Watson‘s continued cancelation, it is conventional to credit Rosalind Franklin with having figured out the structure of DNA from an X-ray diffraction image that she made prior to dying of cancer. In fact, Photo 51 was created by Raymond Gosling, born exactly 100 years ago today.
Wall Street Journal, “Celebrating the Forgotten Man of the DNA Quest” (2012):
But it was [Gosling], supervised by Maurice Wilkins, who in 1950 first took an X-ray photograph of a DNA fiber, which he had wound around a bent paper clip. Of that moment, he writes: “Those discrete diffraction spots emerging on the film in the developing dish was a truly eureka moment. Maurice and I drank several glasses of his sherry.”
It was this photo that electrified Dr. Watson when he saw it presented by Dr. Wilkins at a conference in Naples, Italy. If, as the image implied, the gene had a regular structure, then elucidating that structure might explain its properties. And this quest brought Dr. Watson to (then) Mr. Crick, whom he persuaded to moonlight from the study of proteins and help him tackle DNA.
The WSJ describes Photo 51 as having been a collaborative effort between Franklin and Gosling, so the attribution solely to Rosalind Franklin isn’t completely baseless. ChatGPT: “Franklin was expert at getting DNA fibers into a state suitable for X-ray crystallography, especially controlling humidity so DNA formed the “B form,” the hydrated form that produced Photo 51.”
A standard example of de-Watsonification, “8 Female Scientists Whose Discoveries Were Credited to Men” (Biography.com):
Born in 1920 in London, Rosalind Franklin was a chemist, X-ray crystallographer and leading molecular biologist who discovered the structure of DNA.
Note that in the article about nerds not being properly credited for their nerdism, Raymond Gosling isn’t credited.
They probably should have given the Nobel medicine prize to Watson and Crick, and then the chemistry prize to Wilkins, Franklin, and Gosling.
Roger, I’m fascinated that you seemingly imbue the Nobel gurus with so much wisdom. This is the same group that awarded a prize to Barack Hussein Obama for nothing more than being a white man cosplaying as a disadvantaged black man.