‘Clearly Rosy had to go, or be put in her place’ – Photograph 51 and the injustices that lay at the heart of discovering DNA

Is Rosalind Franklin a ghost that still haunts the history of genomic science? Alan Booth looks into her remarkable story

Rosalind Elsie Franklin died from ovarian cancer on 16 April 1958, aged only 37 years old. Today, on the anniversary of her death, she remains too little known because in her own time, she was wilfully set aside, scorned and overlooked.

As a result of this injustice, the 1962 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was awarded to Francis Crick and James Watson of Cambridge, with Maurice Wilkins of King’s College, London, for their: ‘discoveries concerning the molecular structure of nucleic acids and its significance for information transfer in living material’.

But the cause of the injustice was the unethical distribution of Franklin’s unpublished work in which she had captured the structure of DNA on film.

Photograph 51

Franklin was not credited for her celebrated Photograph 51, shown by Wilkins – who was Franklin’s colleague – to Watson and Crick without her knowledge or consent. It was this image that proved to be the key that unlocked their understanding of the molecular structure of DNA.

Photograph 51 was taken in 1952 by Franklin and her graduate student Raymond Gosling at King’s College London. Franklin had discovered that in dry conditions, the DNA molecule is short and fat; she called it the A form, to distinguish it from the long thin B form present during humidity. While Wilkins chose to investigate form B, which appeared to be helical, Franklin focussed on the more problematic A variety.

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An x-ray diffraction image, it was the key piece of information that revealed the helical structure of A-DNA. The photograph formed part of Franklin’s research, which she had not yet published – or widely shared – but which gave the critical insight into the secret structure of DNA that led to the building of the famous double helix model by Watson and Crick. Franklin was unaware that her data had been shared and used in this way by her King’s College colleague.

Wilkins, who died in 2004, was in fact Franklin’s equal and not her superior within the faculty hierarchy at King’s, although he reportedly thought of himself and behaved as though he was her boss. In 1951, Franklin had been recruited to King’s by physicist Professor John Randall to apply the x-ray crystallography techniques she had developed studying coal to biological molecules, specifically DNA. At the time, Wilkins was already working on DNA and had been doing x-ray studies with Gosling. When Franklin arrived, Randall reassigned Gosling to work under her and gave her independent responsibility for a section of the DNA research.

Knowledge Base

It is noteworthy that her doctoral work into the molecular structure of coal was conducted at the British Coal Utilisation Research Association. Using helium, she studied the porosity of coal, concluding that as the temperature increases, substances are expelled in order of molecular size. Her findings were valuable for predicting fuel performance and for manufacturing gas masks – and was her conscious and deliberate contribution to the British war effort in WWII.

Once at King’s, Randall made it clear to Franklin in writing that she was not working under Wilkins. However, fatefully, this fact was not made equally clear to Wilkins, who assumed Franklin – as a woman – was merely his assistant. Consequently, Franklin, who had secured a three-year fellowship and was at this point leading her own research project, did not take kindly to being treated as a subordinate, leading to clashes and a working relationship doomed to deteriorate. In the end, despite the immensely successful science she conducted, the working environment was poisoned, and Franklin only completed just over two of her forseen three years at King’s, from January 1951 to March 1953.

Wilkin’s decision to take the photograph to Watson and Crick has been the subject of ethical debate ever since. While Wilkins may have thought that he was not doing anything wrong, since the King’s group were all working within the same general research area and were both funded by the newly formed Medical Research Council (MRC), it is now agreed that Franklin’s data was used without permission or proper attribution.

At Cambridge in 1952, Watson and Crick had started to come under pressure following a rushed publication of an incorrect model and were told to stop work on DNA. In that first paper, they had erroneously placed the bases on the outside of the DNA molecule with the phosphates, bound by magnesium or calcium ions, inside. But when Watson was shown Photograph 51 by Wilkins in January 1953, he and Crick quickly went back to their model-building, subsequently publishing their now-famous paper on the double helix model of DNA in Nature in April 1953, under the prosaic title of ‘Molecular structure of nucleic acids’.

Boy’s Club

They had been working under Dr Max Perutz at the Molecular Biology Unit in the Cavendish Laboratory, Cambridge, which Perutz had established in 1947. This new unit was attracting researchers in the emerging field of molecular biology, among them Crick in 1949 and Watson in 1951. In another injustice, Perutz had given the Cambridge pair a copy of an internal King’s College progress report on the 1952 work of Franklin’s London laboratory.

Again, Perutz made this ‘gift’ without Franklin’s knowledge or permission, and clearly before she had the proper chance to publish any analysis of the x-ray photography which formed the content of her progress report. Despite criticism from the scientific community for this action, Perutz later published the report himself and asserted that it had not included anything in it that Franklin herself had not also delivered in a talk given to colleagues working in the DNA field. This had been given in late 1951 and Watson was said to have attended the lecture.

Skipping ahead to 1962, the same year Watson and Crick were recognised, Perutz along with his collaborator Dr John Kendrew, were recipients of the Nobel Prize for Chemistry ‘for studies of the structures of globular proteins’, particularly haemoglobin.

Franklin, being deceased, was ineligible for consideration for the Nobel Prize alongside her male colleagues, in compliance with the rules of the Stockholm-based Nobel Institute which only considers the candidacy of living recipients.

In 1968, Watson published his account of the events leading up the discovery of DNA in his book The Double Helix, which became one of the most popular science books ever written. The book, however, gave a poor and minimising portrayal of Franklin, at one point writing: “clearly Rosy had to go or be put in her place”. It characterised her as obstructive and unenlightened, able to churn out results but without any understanding.

It is now properly recognised that Franklin was a brilliant scientist in her own right whose work in x-ray crystallography played a critical role in the greatest scientific discovery of the twentieth century. At the centre of Franklin’s work was a single image – Photograph 51 – an image which was obtained through her meticulous experimental precision.

Building Blocks

Born in London in 1920, Franklin grew up in an intellectually curious, if unscientific, family that supported her academic work at a time when it was still a notable exception – and often frowned upon – for a woman to follow a career in research. Excelling in science, Franklin studied chemistry as an undergraduate at Newnham College, Cambridge from 1938. Once WWII broke out, Cambridge took in a number of academic refugees, one of whom was French scientist Adrienne Weill, who arrived at Newnham in 1940. Franklin attended a lecture Weill gave on Marie Curie and in 1947, having completed her PhD, joined Weill in Paris at the Laboratoire Central des Services Chimiques de l’Etat. Once in Paris, Franklin began to collaborate with Jacques Mering, a Lithuanian-born and Russian-educated pioneer in x-ray diffraction where they worked on applications of x-ray crystallography to the study of amorphous substances.

It was this project that laid the groundwork for her later technical innovations in pursuit of using x-ray diffraction to examine DNA. Once at King’s she refined the process of preparing DNA fibres for x-ray, which involved drawing the fibres out into thin strands and controlling their humidity to produce clearer diffraction patterns. She also used a finer x-ray beam alongside improved camera techniques to achieve unprecedentedly clear images of DNA. By contrast, Watson and Crick’s work was entirely theoretical and involved no capture of any images of DNA using x-ray diffraction, relying on others’ experimental data.

Upon obtaining Photograph 51, Franklin deduced critical features of DNA’s structure, including that it had two strands, that its phosphate groups were positioned on the outside – in contradiction to the first erroneous paper – and that it followed a helical pattern with repeating measurements. But Franklin, who was meticulous in her approach, was unwilling to make speculative leaps without a solid evidence base.

After King’s

Soon, Franklin moved to Birkbeck College in London and commenced study into the structures of viruses, largely unaware of how extensively her data had been used until much later. But tragically, she was diagnosed with ovarian cancer in 1956 – a final irony as this cancer was likely exacerbated by her prolonged exposure to x-ray radiation during her long years of research. Continuing to work until the final months of her life, she embarked on controversial research into live polio virus and the tobacco mosaic virus (TMV), which had been the first virus ever to be identified in 1989.

Indeed, Franklin built a nearly two-metre-high model of the TMV virus that was displayed at the Brussels World Fair in 1958. It used unlikely materials including 250 polystyrene moulds like those that were used to display hats in shop windows. However, Franklin never saw the final result as the Fair opened on April 17, just one day after her death.

Sidelined even in death, Franklin’s name was notably absent from both proceedings and the acceptance speeches when Watson, Crick and Wilkins were awarded their Nobel Prize. As her sister Jenifer Glynn wrote in The Lancet, in 2012:

• “Four years after her death, [when] Francis Crick and James Watson accepted the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine [they did so] without mentioning her in their speeches. This seemed a deliberate omission, implied by Crick’s written comment to Watson that he wanted to avoid ‘anything in the way of a historical account’.”

Redemption

Now, Franklin is rightly recognised as one of the most important figures in molecular biology and her story is often cited as a powerful example of the challenges faced by women in science. But her scientific legacy has come to inspire researchers today, with institutions and awards now bearing her name to honour her contributions and ensure that her work is restored from a footnote in the history of DNA to its rightful place as a fundamental pillar supporting one of the greatest discoveries of all time.

Quoting from Glynn’s writing again:

• “Now a sometimes almost unrecognisable Rosalind has been put on an unrealistic pedestal. She is no longer a warning but has become ‘the forgotten heroine’. Her story has been adopted by feminists as a symbol of a woman struggling and unacknowledged in a man’s world. This would, I think, have embarrassed her almost as much as Watson’s account would have upset her.”

Franklin thought of herself as a scientist whose achievements were to be judged on merit, rather than striking any blow for the rights of women as a ‘female scientist’. And as such, rightly and on her own terms, she was a giant.

Glynn closes her article to the memory of her sister:

• “Today, King’s College now has a Franklin Wilkins Building and a distinguished series of lectures in Rosalind’s name. There are Rosalind Franklin Buildings in Cambridge for Newnham College, and in Brussels for Louvain University, while a whole university has adopted her name in Chicago. I am constantly amazed at the rash of TV and radio programmes, plays, and projects for films. Although she was never an active feminist, perhaps the memorials that would have pleased her best are those that use her name to promote opportunities for young women academics – the annual award given by the Royal Society to promote women in science, and the fellowships given by the University of Groningen to help launch women who are beginning their academic careers. She is certainly not forgotten.”

Indeed, Nicole Kidman sprinkled some Hollywood stardust on the memory of Franklin, portraying her in ‘Photograph 51’ by Anna Ziegler at the Noel Coward Theatre in London’s West End during 2015.

Rosalind Elsie Franklin, 25 July 1920—16 April 1958. Exeunt omnes.

For further reading please visit:

• The Lancet
• The Rosalind Franklin Institute
• Google Books - 'My Sister Rosalind Franklin' 
• Google Books - 'Rosalind Franklin: The Dark Lady of DNA'
• Google Books - 'Rosalind Franklin and DNA'
• University of California, Berkeley
• Rosalind Franklin University of Medicine and Science, Chicago
• The Royal Society
• Photograph 51 play
• Anna Ziegler - playright
• The Guardian