How did Rosalind Franklin miss the helix in her iconic DNA image? She didn't
science.org
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That's the first actual evidence I've seen (I am a DNA nerd and have been trying to understand what her contribution to the intellectual discovery of DNA's double-helix antiparalel).
I would need to go back to Judson's book (Eighth Day of Creation) and see if he actually missed this.
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FTA:
The new paper does not challenge Watson and Crick’s achievement. Their model of DNA, rushed out in a brief article in Nature after Watson caught his glimpse of photograph 51, went well beyond Franklin’s understanding. [Watson and Crick's model's] two strands running in opposite directions and zipperlike arrangement of complementary base pairs explained how the molecule could carry genetic information and be copied each time a cell divides. “The fact that it was a helix, you know, was not the most exciting aspect of this structure,” says Soraya de Chadarevian, a science historian at the University of California, Los Angeles. Indeed, by 1952, other researchers striving to make sense of the molecule also suspected it was helical. [for example Pauling, who at one point thought DNA might be an alpha helix-like structure]
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Instead, this new paper and several previous papers based on Franklin's notes:
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10739-026-09866-7 (the paper referenced in the article) -> Franklin's notes say "“evidence for [a] 2-chain […] helix.”Footnote21" where Footnote 21 is Notebook entry for 10 February 1953 (FRKN 1/1, Franklin Papers). The images of her notes are here: https://www.jessiemillsauthor.com/journalism/photo-49-the-x-... (I can't read her handwriting, so I'm taking the 2-chain helix on faith. Also, this article https://philpapers.org/archive/NIETNC-3.pdf interprets her notes to say she recognized the complementary bases: " Franklin’s notebook entry of January 19, 1953—“diads in A. Chargaff data” (Klug index, FRKN 1/1, p. 3)—demonstrates that she had inferred complementary base pairing from the conjunction of Chargaff’s ratios and the crystallographic dyad symmetry, eleven days before Watson saw Photo 51.
So based on the above interpretation, I would probably update my understanding from:
1) Gosling collected the fibre diffraction data and Franklin recognized both that it was a helix, and that the bases were on the inside and complementary. 2) Watson and Crick deduced that DNA formed a double helix with antiparallel chains.
And now I would update it to: 1) Gosling collected the fibre diffraction data and Franklin recognized both that it was a double helix, and that the bases were on the inside and complementary. At that point I think she would have recognized the chains were antiparallel due to dyad symmetry, right?) 2) Watson and Crick deduced that DNA formed a double helix with antiparallel chains.
That's the key bit- I had not previously seen any evidence that Franklin knew it was a double helix or that she knew about the complementary bases. And since this is an area that generates a lot of strong emotions, and there's a lot of noise, I'd like to see her exact text, but I simply cannot read her handwriting.
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> Evidence for 2-chain (or 1-chain helix)?
> 49c - general trend is as for single containing helix
> (which differs from single * chain in integral no. residues/*
> only in contribn of high order J'n to the latter)
The crossed out bit says:
> and this is indistinguishable from double helix with residues on
> each having same ζ-value, since 2nd chain has opposite signs in
> ξ & η terms (eq 1 - 2), and eqn 2 contains only [...]
She was certainly thinking about double helixes.
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In my mind this doesn't actually meet the final necessary criteria for full credit for the B-DNA double helical structure with base complementarity details, nor the recognition of its implications, it mainly changes some internal bits of the story.
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The images seem to contain commentary on Klug's commentary on Franklins work, in the same color?? The text contradicts the timelines that it cites from Klug, the paper focuses on some seemingly irrelevant details, and makes claims about the dispute I've never heard before (for example that phosphates on the outside was stolen - years after she published that finding at a conference in which Watson was in the audience). It also suggests that Klug - a fierce advocate for Franklin's legacy - was also trying to diminish her work.
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As for base complementarity it seems likely that she would have made that leap from everything else that she knew of at the time, but I'm no expert on this subject and have not read her notes.
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> It is easy to feel great sympathy with Franklin. The fact remains that she never made the inductive leap... before she learned about the model proposed by Watson and Crick, she and Gosling began to draft a paper to state their conclusions so far about the B structure. That draft also survived among Franklin’s papers. It was vigorous, clear, and limited. Klug and I went over it one afternoon in his office. “You see, she was lacking one final step,” Klug said. “Well, two steps. What she missed was the presence of the dyad—the symmetry of the molecule. Which Francis had seen immediately from her information about the space group. And even though her notes earlier showed that she knew about Chargaff’s ratios, she never got to the base pairing.”
Seems like Judson accepts Klug's version of the story: she understood that the structure was helical, but not that it was doubled or base-pair. There's also a final essay at the end of the book "In defence of Rosalind Franklin" which basically reiterates this:
"She had not perceived that the backbones run in opposite directions. She had not started modelling the B form as a double helix and so had yet even to encounter the problem of fitting the bases inside."
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Helical DNA was the strongest candidate by 51, in part because earlier and cruder X-ray diffraction images had existed for some time (10+ years) and were suggestive of this structure. All of the scientists in question, and many others, collaborated on that possibility at that time, and long before 'Photo 51'. It was not a surprise, but rather the focus of their work.
Franklin was making the famous improved images with the explicit intent of revealing or disproving the helical structure. She and her lab produced the most definitive evidence for helical B-DNA (Photo 51) in early 52, but during 52 the conclusion was still a matter of debate (and humor) amongst them - in particular Franklin was not convinced that A-DNA was helical. From Wiki:
> In July 1952, as a practical joke on Wilkins (who frequently expressed his view that both forms of DNA were helical), Franklin and Gosling produced a funeral notice regretting the 'death' of helical A-DNA
This left the molecular structure and number of strands as open questions. Triple helix models had been attempted by Pauling, Watson and Crick at that time. Watson and Crick though were first to develop the successful double helix model with antiparallel base pairs in early 1953. It is likely that Franklin had also come to the conclusion that DNA was a double helix by this time (based on her draft notes + circumstantial evidence) but she did not do so in total isolation, nor did she complete the final molecular part of the puzzle (though she had worked on it).
TL;DR DNA structure was not a eureka moment spurred by a single breakthrough thought or piece of evidence; many scientists collaborated on eliminating various likely possibilities for years until the correct model was found.
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It was Watson and Crick who discovered the double helix, even if Franklin did write something down about a single helix from a previous photo that they didn't read.
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https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-01313-5
It seems like there are several different parts to the discovery of the "structure of DNA" and different people contributed.
1. DNA is helical
2. DNA is a double helix
3. The ACGT copying mechanism
Part 1 was Franklin and Wilkins. Part 3 was Watson and Crick. Part 2 is the part under debate, to what degree was the double helix clear from just Franklin's imaging?
But really, how much does it matter? It seems like the four of them each contributed a lot. The Nobel prize only went to the other three, in large part because Franklin died before it was given out.
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Watson's shadow would not extend so far if Franklin's role were known - not just because it would have diminished his, but also because her presence would have undermined attitudes that marginalized non-white-men, in the field of science and beyond. It matters a great deal, unfortunately. And it's a tough pill to swallow for a lot of people who have their pride wrapped up in what he represents.
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A Nobel can only be split among 3. Agree with the rest of your post.
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Seems to me that #3 is the whole story. That was the key insight, the thing that was never known before. The secret to how life replicates.
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In today's standards, or at least what I am used to, Franklin and Wilkins should be co-authors of the "Molecular Structure of Nucleic Acids: A Structure for Deoxyribose Nucleic Acid" Watson & Crick paper. But they only got this note at the end: "We have also been stimulated by a knowledge of the general nature of the unpublished experimental results and ideas of Dr. M. H. F. Wilkins, Dr. R. E. Franklin", not even talking about the image but giving the impression that they had an unimportant talk while having an informal tea.
But they (W & C) include this text: "The previously published X-ray data on deoxyribose nucleic acid are insufficient for a rigorous test of our structure. So far as we can tell, it is roughly compatible with the experimental data, but it must be regarded as unproved until it has been checked against more exact result". They suck for this: they could ask Wilkins & Franklin to include the X-ray that is sufficient to base their claims, add them as authors, and make a better article. But they choose to "be stimulated" by the perfect picture 51 and claim ignorance afterwards.
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If any of you have time, I’ll tell you how I invented Twitter, Reddit, and AI assistants.
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[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photo_51#/media/File:60251254_...
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(edit: should note the HN submission title (at present "Despite what Watson said, Rosalind Franklin understood structure of DNA first") does not actually occur in TFA)
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Edit: Since https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49969073 was posted earlier and the comments there were more substantive, I've merged the thread thither and re-upped that one.
I have also re-upped 2 other excellent submissions you made - thank you!
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At any rate, suppression of such comments is to be expected for CJ style groups but not for open-minded discussions.
Same applies to my dead comments 49953689, 49954141, as well as 49938615 and 49941900, on the subject of Hiroshima. If you cannot even quote top experts and administrators with first-hand knowledge (such as A. de Seversky and general C. Sams) just because they contradict the prevailing narrative, then what kind of discussion is that? And the flavour of "curiosity" involved must be very peculiar.
Frankly, my impression is that some people are using or abusing the "flag" feature and perhaps other features they may have at their disposal to remove opinions and facts they don't like or don't even want to see published.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_molecular_biology#D...
>In 1948, [Linus] Pauling discovered that many proteins included helical (see alpha helix) shapes. Pauling had deduced this structure from X-ray patterns and from attempts to physically model the structures. (Pauling was also later to suggest an incorrect three chain helical DNA structure based on Astbury's data.) Even in the initial diffraction data from DNA by Maurice Wilkins, it was evident that the structure involved helices.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DNA#History
>Franklin told Crick and Watson that the [phosphate] backbones had to be on the outside. Before then, Linus Pauling, and Watson and Crick, had erroneous models with the chains inside and the bases pointing outwards.
The mere idea of a helix is not especially complex and could have existed in the minds of many theorists at the time. Franklin's discovery provided the final piece of the puzzle, but the desire to attribute major scientific discoveries to a single author or team is based on an incorrect interpretation of the scientific process. The real reason that Franklin didn't win the Nobel Prize is because she died:
>In 1962, after Franklin's death, Watson, Crick, and Wilkins jointly received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.[210] Nobel Prizes are awarded only to living recipients. A debate continues about who should receive credit for the discovery.
A student of Franklin, Raymond Gosling, actually took Photo 51. He was not awarded the Prize.
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Watson may not have been the nicest scientist, but many people made wrong conclusions back then. Most famous is Linus Pauling's triple helix suggestion.
https://scarc.library.oregonstate.edu/coll/pauling/dna/narra...
The article here makes it sound as if Watson and Crick failed completely and were solely leeches on Franklin. Now you can state that there was a mistreatment by Watson and Crick with regards to Franklin, but the article suggests that she made the ground-breaking suggestions. But then why did she not write an article earlier? Yes, you can say that the health was poor and this may have delayed her analysis - but by the same token you can say the article inflates her own contributions with regards to the dsDNA helix.
> Science historian Alistair Sponsel of the Science History Institute and crystallographer Brian Sutton of KCL argue Franklin knew the earlier photo had revealed a helix
That in itself was not an insight at all. See Pauling's triple helix. Conclusion Pauling would have made the correct prediction eventually, he was a genius, but at that time he failed (and if I recall correctly he did not have access to Franklin's data, at the least I seem to remember that, e. g. Watson and Crack had access to the data due to a third guy who was also near or on the campus site; I don't rememeber where Pauling was, but he was probably not "in the close loop" right there, at that time).
And, if I also recall correctly, the helix theory was already proposed before that. I don't remember where I read it, so it could be wrong, but I think older scientific articles or books mentioned it or speculated about. At the least I am almost 100% certain that neither Franklin, Watson, Crick, Pauling etc... were the first to make such a proposal. Phoebus Levene made some suggestions too, even if wrong, you can see that people were getting closer to the puzzle and I think someone else too. But anyway, people will probably only remember Watson and Crick here and I think it is still deservedly so. Nobody says that these two were the only contributors ever.
> photograph 49, showing she made extensive notes about it despite a cosmetic defect. She recognized it suggested a helical structure and used it to calculate, for the first time, the length of each turn in the spiral—34 angstroms—and the number of bases “per turn of helix (if there is a helix).”
Ok, but you can make any local notes. These are not as useful as publishing a "it has not escaped our attention" article.
> No wonder Franklin recorded little in her notes about photograph 51, Sponsel and Sutton argue. She saw no need to repeat herself. Franklin “knows exactly what’s in front of her,” says Betty Smocovitis, a science historian at the University of Florida and co-editor of the Journal of the History of Biology.
No, I don't think so. If she would have had that as an insight, it would have solved many things, just as Crick and Watson did reason about in their own article. So perhaps she was slow. Or she did not figure out the implication; it's difficult to say.
> The flawed image was good enough to reveal key details of the helix to Franklin. But she did not think it was good enough to publish.
You can find billion reasons as to why you don't want to publish. Whatever the reasons, even if one thinks Crick and Watson were sneaky, she was slower. It seems to me as if many do post-analysis from the point of view "everyone was so unfair to her". That is understandable but that's not how science works.
> The reason, they say, is that Franklin was trying to understand different forms of the molecule before publishing
Sorry, that's garbage. Or worded differently, perhaps Crick understood biology better than Franklin did. In fact, I think Crick was smarter than Watson too - no clue why Watson is so praised in the USA.
> Sutton says he understands why she spent months on it, quipping, “I’m a crystallographer, so I want data-rich photos. I can’t do much with a photograph that only has six spots on it.”
Apparently Crick could, so ... and he was correct as well. I am finding these excuses not good here. They seem to come more from the point of view of how unfair life is.
> It was almost a year before she resumed puzzling out the structure of wet DNA.
Well. Crick and Watson did not wait a year.
> But by then Watson and Crick, drawing in part on Franklin’s data, were busy building the metal ball-and-stick model that would soon reveal the molecule’s full form and function.
That is objectively true - they took advantage of that and did not credit her more. No objection. But the "Franklin was the true discoverer" is also just incorrect. It can be debated how much Crick and Watson (also notice how the article prefers to name Watson first) contributed individually; personally I think Crick contributed more since he was smarter than Watson (and Pauling in turn was smarter than Crick, but he was more of a chemist than Crick, who clearly had more understanding of biology than Pauling had, see the central dogma by Crick, even if dogma is a misnomer and it had to be extended lateron) - the article really wants to change a narrative here. That's propaganda.
The only take-away that one could draw is that Franklin contributed more while also being about a step away from a very similar conclusion Crick and Watson made, but these two simply were faster. That's simply an objective fact.
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No, that's just not correct. There were hundreds of people trying to get there and there were a ton of totally wrong theories with people trying to convince others to take them seriously. Not everyone was engaging in activity that could have ever solved the problem, very few were. Why do you think some scientists seem to have dozens or hundreds of major discoveries, but virtually all scientists have no major discoveries? Just luck? They steal them and don't get caught?
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I'm not making a 'great man' narrative. I'm just applying the Pareto Principle. 80% of research output will be by 20% of researchers. of that 80%, 80% will be by 20% of the 20%. so about 4% of researchers will be responsible for 64% of research output. This turns out to be surprisingly accurate.
It's not a 'great man' narrative, it's just the statement of long verified statistics.
I wonder if you find your position of "there are lots of smart people and success in research is mostly luck" attractive because you would like to believe you could have been a great researcher if you were more lucky?
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She might have measured those parameters, but she still didn't know what she had (as evidenced by how she subsequently spent a ton of time on Z-dna)
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When I was studying spindle shaped viruses by electron microscopy we'd get beautiful fiber diffraction patterns in the fourier transform of the micrographs. I always wanted to try and solve the helical parameters but never got around to it.
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Actually, of all of the characters involved, she was the only chemist. Watson was a biologist, Crick was a physicist, as was Wilkins. That's why Franklin was ultimately brought in: to make further progress, they needed a chemist with crystallography experience, and Franklin was the one who had that experience.
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... and owner of a time-travelling mind-reading machine. /i
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But, when some male jerk tries to claim they invented X or discovered X, but really a woman did so (something that is not unique to here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matilda_effect) it's good for people to correct the mistake and properly attribute the person who really made the discovery/invention.
pythonRon[29 comments hidden]
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topham[hidden]
jacobolus[5 comments hidden]
amiga386[4 comments hidden]
Are you one of these people?
https://www.dictionary.com/browse/fortuitous
> Many object to the use of fortuitous to mean simply “fortunate” and insist that it should be limited to its original sense of “accidental.” In modern standard use, however, fortuitous almost always carries the senses both of accident or chance and luck or fortune. It is infrequently used in its sense of “accidental” without the suggestion of good luck, and even less frequently in the sense “lucky” without at least a suggestion of accident or chance
jacobolus[3 comments hidden]
In any case, neither of these words is the right choice in the context of the previous comment. A word like "incredible" or "unlikely" or "amazing" would more clearly express the idea.
amiga386[2 comments hidden]
I disagree. Fortuitous/fortunate/lucky/convenient all work better.
Compare the usage of "luckily" in this quote from The Naked Gun 2½: The Smell of Fear:
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0102510/quotes/?item=qt0434008
> Commissioner Anabell Brumford: Ladies and gentlemen, I would now like to introduce a most special American. Tonight, he is being honoured for his 1000th drug-dealer killed.
> Lt. Frank Drebin: [to applause] Thank you. But, in all honesty, the last three I backed over with my car. Luckily, they turned out to be drug-dealers.
Here, "luckily" gives the dark implication that the police covered up Drebin's killing of three people by posthumously framing them as drug-dealers... and maybe the other 997 people as well. "Luckily" is nicely understated where "amazingly" would be too obvious, and "incredibly" doesn't work at all.
jacobolus[hidden]
But "so fortuitous a coinicidence" is redundant and confusing; it means, basically, "so coincidental a coincidence".
amiga386[hidden]
I believe Franklin would have shared the Nobel prize with Watson and Crick had she not died before she could be nominated. The Nobel committee just don't offer posthumous prizes. That compounds the problem of Watson and KCL minimising her contribution. But if she had survived, I'm confident there would've been a huge dust-up as to whether she or Wilkins got third spot on the Nobel prize. As she was already dead before the DNA structure was confirmed, history couldn't go that way.
It's misattribution of causality. She wasn't nominated because she was dead and she suffered academic sexism, chauvinism and skullduggery, especially from Watson. It's not that she wasn't nominated because of academic sexism, chauvinism and skullduggery.
matsemann[2 comments hidden]
I read through these once. For those where I've been in the wrong, it's two patterns repeating. Either that I learned something in school / as a kid, and it was "correct" at the time but now we know better. Or that the common belief has just always been wrong.
Examples include that "glass is liquid", "bulls hate red", "touching a baby bird will make the mother abandon it", "you only taste salt on part X of your tongue" etc.
peterfirefly[hidden]
I've never believe that one. I have sometimes eaten a little bit of salt in the form of grains and it was completely obvious that I could taste the salt all over the top of the tongue.
I cannot for the life of me understand how anybody ever came to believe something like that.
It's not like modern people don't have plentiful access to cheap salt, sugar, citrus/lime juice, etc.
> "glass is liquid"
This one makes a lot more sense but the belief that old glass panes in windows are thicker at the bottom because glass is liquid rather than it being an obvious consequence of the manufacturing method -- blow a glass bubble and cut it up and flatten the pieces -- also seems insane to me. It's on the level of Americans believing rail gauges are derived from the width of Roman carts and refusing to accept that people used (and still use) many different rail gauges.
fiforpg[2 comments hidden]
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wisty[7 comments hidden]
Wilkins produced the initial samples, trained Gosling (who took photo 51) and then had his samples and assistant (Gosling) taken when the high flying Franklin was hired.
Wilkins took lower quality photos before Franklin was even in the lab, and showed them to Watson at a conference.
Yes, Franklin built a way better x-ray camera.
But she was also allegedly pretty horrid to Wilkins. She mocked Wilkins as a "middle class" idiot and refused to share her data with him (Gosling did show Wilkins photo 51 when ordered by higher ups, which Gosling had taken, we don't talk about Gosling because PhD students don't get credit right?).
Franklin held a funeral for the double helix, because I guess she thought Wilkins was an idiot to suggest DNA was a double helix.
Yeah, Wilkins was a little bit rude, giving as little credit to her as possible. But if some privileged upper-class rockstar moves into your lab, tries to freeze you out, mocks you for your theory, then you figure out you can prove your theory is correct (using a photo your former assistant took using the rockstar's camera, and some help from a couple of other researchers) then yeah ... are you really going out of your way to praise them, even if maybe they could have eventually figured it out?
skew-aberration[hidden]
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wisty[hidden]
People do look a bit funny at Watson though ... he apparently became a bit of a crackpot in later years.
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While it's fair to say that she contributed more (EDIT: Crick actually developed a lot of the mathematical theory which Franklin herself used so I'm not decided) than Watson/Crick (phosphates on the outside, precise helix and double helix measurements), and that her contributions were minimized at the time, she did not solve the DNA structure herself, and she certainly didn't do it alone. There are many others who made large contributions to this project and whose names are totally unknown to the average person. She was acknowledged by Watson/Crick and her work was published in the same issue of Nature - nobody could be unaware of her contributions. Watson later tried to rewrite history with himself at the center and was widely panned, even at the time.
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yubblegum[2 comments hidden]
Which is how we ended up with a famous electric car company named after Tesla, whereas Edison was far more involved with the type and contributed to battery technology for EVs of the day.
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Georgelemental[hidden]
No it won't lol, it already isn't. Source: attended school. When there is a political will, there is a way
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