Rosalind Franklin, the unjustly forgotten story of the great scientist who discovered DNA

James Watson said of her: "She's got a real bad temper!

It's all too easy to criticize someone's character when you want to harm them. But there's no denying that Rosalind has character, and fortunately so, for it's a character that has to be well forged when you're a young Englishwoman who decides to plunge into the world of science at a time when barely 5% of girls manage to get their doctorate, compared with 95% of boys. And when, on top of that, your father thinks that higher education is not for women! It took character to pursue her scientific studies during the war years, when her teachers, even if they recognized her qualities, were not inclined to encourage her. Moreover, no one helped her, and there was a strong belief in England that science was not a field in which women could express themselves.
Yet in 1945, she obtained her doctorate in Physics and Chemistry at Cambridge. Her thesis topic was the porosity of carbon structures. Her ambition was to become the world's leading specialist on the subject, and so she pursued studies in crystallography. With the war over, she was finally able to move to Paris for a "post doc" at the CNRS and pursue her research at the Laboratoire Central des Services Chimiques de l'Etat. Paris was wonderful, a city just recovering from the war, but welcoming to a girl embarking on a career in chemistry. And yes, Marie Curie had been there! She left her mark by bringing home her two Nobel Prizes, and everyone in France knows that a woman can be at the highest level of research. Rosalind learned to master the techniques of X-ray diffraction between the Eiffel Tower and the Opéra Garnier; the aim was to precisely determine the structures of carbon, particularly graphite, using X-rays to analyze its cross-sections. She became a leading specialist in X-ray diffractometry, which enables the precise, three-dimensional reconstruction of complex chemical molecules. Like Marie Curie, and perhaps too much like her role model, she was an expert in the use of X-rays. She would later pay dearly for this irradiation.
But the year was 1948, and the scientific world was busy with something quite different from carbon crystals. In fact, since the beginning of the 20th century and the work of Walter Sutton, we've known that it's the chromosomes in the cell nucleus that carry genetic information, the famous "characters" whose laws and behavior Mendel had brilliantly described in 1856. But chemically, in what form? We know there's DNA in the cell nucleus, but no one would think that such a molecule, made up of substances as basic as sugars, phosphates and nitrogenous bases, could carry a message as complex and subtle as the transmission of hereditary traits. Rather, it's there to provide energy, and genetic traits are certainly based on proteins, which are much more noble and complex molecules. It's more logical and more... classy! And any researcher who doubts this is bound to be laughed at, like poor Oswald Avery, who is still torturing his pneumococci^* to demonstrate the role of DNA in heredity, against all the expectations of the academic intelligentsia.

But what we don't know is what these DNA molecules look like, how they transfer this information and in what form. The mystery is complete. Several laboratories are setting up teams to unravel this problem.

Rosalind Franklin returned from Paris in 1951 to be recruited by John Randal in the laboratory of the famous King's College London, which had decided to focus on the structure of DNA. Randal had enquired about Rosalind's skills, which he felt would be useful in advancing the subject. He teamed her up with Maurice Wilkins, discreetly telling the latter that he was giving him an excellent "collaborator". But let's be clear, Rosalind was not hired as Wilkins' collaborator, but as a research associate. But in the minds of Randall and Wilkins, a woman can only serve men in a research laboratory. Rosalind doesn't accept this situation and relations between Wilkins and herself become strained... But always a hard worker, she plunges into her new research subject and begins to apply X-ray diffraction to the study of biological materials and more particularly to the study of deoxyribonucleic acid.

At the same time, Francis Crick and the American James Watson were working with the Franklin-Wilkins couple. Unlike Franklin, Watson and Crick were not experimenters. On the other hand, they understood how important it was to discover the mystery of DNA structure, and they wanted to be the first to unravel it.
Wilkins complains about being excluded from Rosalind's work, and Randal is forced to separate the belligerents. Franklin takes her first X-ray spectrographic images with another colleague, Raymond Gosling. Her knowledge of crystallography enabled her to mathematically deduce the spatial structure of large molecules from two-dimensional X-ray images. In 1952, she produced a remarkable image of a DNA fiber at King's College London. This photograph, which became known as cliché 51, was to be the starting point for all the deductions that led to an understanding of the double-helix structure of DNA, essential for understanding how it works.
In March 1953, Rosalind decided to leave King's College, as her collaboration with the mysogynistic Wilkins was becoming unbearable. But Randal insisted that the results obtained at the Laboratory should remain at King's College. Honestly, Rosalind allows Goslin, who has been working with her, to share her results, including the famous cliché 51. Preferring to form an alliance with the other research team, Wilkins then shows the famous cliché to Watson and Crick, who until then had achieved nothing in their laboratory by imagining molecular set-ups with beads and wire.

Franklin, on bad terms with Wilkins who had thought she was an assistant, had long refused to share the results of her work with him. However, in March 1953, having decided to leave King's College, she authorized Gosling to show Wilkins cliché 51, where Rosalind Franklin succeeded in determining her structure of the DNA double helix by distinguishing, thanks to her clichés, the two helices, named A and B. On the other hand, her superior had asked that the results of her work remain at King College. Unbeknownst to Franklin, Wilkins shared them with Watson and Crick, who also had access to a departmental evaluation report. When she learned that Watson and Crick on the one hand, and Wilkins on the other, were going to publish articles in Nature on the structure of DNA, she demanded that one of her articles reporting on either the helix or corkscrew structure be published in the same issue.

On April 25, 1953, Nature published all three articles. Watson and Crick's article merely states that they were stimulated by a knowledge of the general nature of [Wilkins and Franklin's] unpublished experimental results and ideas, and they state in the body of the article that they were not aware of the results presented in the other two Nature articles, which confirm their proposed helical structure. However, Watson would later admit in The Double Helix that knowledge of these data was essential to finding the solution, and that no one at King's College had realized that these data were in their possession. The three articles published in Nature thus complement each other, but it is Watson and Crick's article that is given the most prominence.

The discovery of the helical structure of DNA is truly a major breakthrough in understanding the great mystery of heredity. This is because the double helix in which nitrogenous bases are precisely paired with their complementary bases. This structure is chemically very robust and allows easy replication. It will ensure protein synthesis by being copied and transferred by messenger RNA (ribonucleic acid containing only one strand of the helix), which will only be discovered later. The sequence of DNA bases (Adenine, Thymine, Guanine and Cytosine) is therefore a vast universal language that codes for the manufacture of all proteins and enzymes in living organisms from blue-green algae to gorillas and humans.

This discovery clearly merited the ultimate reward. The Nobel Prize was awarded in 1962 to Watson, Crick and Wilkins. Rosalind should have been associated as a major contributor. Sadly, she died in 1958 of ovarian cancer, the genesis of which may have been influenced by the radiation she had received during her research. In their acceptance speeches in Stockholm, neither Crick nor Watson thought it appropriate to at least mention Rosalind Franklin's role in their discovery. Only Wilkins mentioned her name.

In 1968, James Watson published "The Double Helix, a Personal Account of the Discovery of the Structure of DNA", in which he takes the liberty of commenting on Rosalind, highlighting her (bad) character and accusing her of being a feminist who interfered with her colleagues' thinking. The tone of this book, coming from a Nobel Prize winner, elicits a number of reactions and draws the attention of some observers to the role played by Rosalind, a role not initially perceived by non-specialists. Finally, in the epilogue to his book (10 years later), Watson admits that he was wrong in his initial judgments about Rosalind Franklin, that her work had been superb and that she had faced barriers as a woman of science...

*Avery was the subject of appalling criticism and attempts were made to ridicule him, with the exception of a few scientists like Burnet and Lwoff, both future Nobel Prize winners.