Might this criticism have been politically motivated?
For a while she actively campaigned against DNA being a double helix, see e.g. her 'obiturary' for the double helix [1] which preceeds Watson and Crick’s paper. Might her insistence that DNA is not a double helix have misled Wilkins and others?
This is complicated issue. Specifically, The Double Helix, cited in the original HN post, does mention Rosalind Franklin but in a rather demeaning way that slights her contributions -- which came to be highly criticized in subsequent years.
This is the relevant section from the Wikipedia article, which like most Wikipedia articles on contentious topics should be taken with a grain of salt and not substituted for original sources:
Recognition of her contribution to the model of DNA
Upon the completion of their model, Crick and Watson had invited Wilkins to be a co-author of their paper describing the structure.[186] Wilkins turned down this offer, as he had taken no part in building the model.[187] He later expressed regret that greater discussion of co-authorship had not taken place as this might have helped to clarify the contribution the work at King's had made to the discovery.[188] There is no doubt that Franklin's experimental data were used by Crick and Watson to build their model of DNA in 1953. Some, including Maddox, have explained this citation omission by suggesting that it may be a question of circumstance, because it would have been very difficult to cite the unpublished work from the MRC report they had seen.[78]
Indeed, a clear timely acknowledgment would have been awkward, given the unorthodox manner in which data were transferred from King's to Cambridge. However, methods were available. Watson and Crick could have cited the MRC report as a personal communication or else cited the Acta articles in press, or most easily, the third Nature paper that they knew was in press. One of the most important accomplishments of Maddox's widely acclaimed biography is that Maddox made a well-received case for inadequate acknowledgement. "Such acknowledgement as they gave her was very muted and always coupled with the name of Wilkins".[189]
Twenty five years after the fact, the first clear recitation of Franklin's contribution appeared as it permeated Watson's account, The Double Helix, although it was buried under descriptions of Watson's (often quite negative) regard towards Franklin during the period of their work on DNA. This attitude is epitomized in the confrontation between Watson and Franklin over a preprint of Pauling's mistaken DNA manuscript.[190] Watson's words impelled Sayre to write her rebuttal, in which the entire chapter nine, "Winner Take All" has the structure of a legal brief dissecting and analyzing the topic of acknowledgement.[191]
Sayre's early analysis was often ignored because of perceived feminist overtones in her book. Watson and Crick did not cite the X-ray diffraction work of Wilkins and Franklin in their original paper, though they admit having "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 and their co-workers at King's College, London".[81] In fact, Watson and Crick cited no experimental data at all in support of their model. Franklin and Gosling's publication of the DNA X-ray image, in the same issue of Nature, served as the principal evidence:
Thus our general ideas are not inconsistent with the model proposed by Watson and Crick in the preceding communication.[192]
The section you cite does not mention that F. explicitly
campaigned against the helix model for a while. Why? If we exclude the
option that she deliberately lied about it and publically spoke
against the helix model so as to mislead others (which would be a
major breach of scientic ethics) -- and we should: "de mortuis nil nisi
bonum dicendum est" -- then she failed to see what others did see.
To use the vernacular:
The issue with Watson's original account is here in the Johnson's text:
After negotiations between both labs, papers by Wilkins and by Franklin and Gosling appeared in the same issue of Nature along with the one by Watson and Crick. (They can all be found on a website at Nature, and an annotated version of the Watson-Crick paper is at the Exploratorium’s site.) Toward the end of their paper, they flatly state that “We were not aware of the details of the results presented [by the King’s scientists] when we devised our structure, which rests mainly though not entirely on published experimental data and stereochemical arguments.” Yet they go on to write in an acknowledgment, three paragraphs later: “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 and their co-workers at King’s College, London.”
The sentences seem to contradict each other, and in any case Watson made a point, in his book The Double Helix, to describe the pivotal moment when he saw Photo 51.
So the controversy continues. Was it ethical for Wilkins to show Watson his colleague’s work without asking her first? Should she have been invited to be a coauthor on the historic paper? Watson hardly helped his case with his belittling comments about Franklin in The Double Helix.
The bigger issue from the original Hacker News post is Watson and also Feynman's portrayal of their work as highly independent of their colleagues: "disregarding" others.
You keep ignoring the elephant in the room: that she was wrong (in the charitable interpretation). Why?
I'd appreciate it if you could state clearly whether you think
- F. got it wrong, or
- she knew/assumed early on that it was a helix, but lied about it?
Thank you.
As to whether the X-rays should have been seen by Crick/Watson, The research was publically
funded. Publically funded research should be open and transparent. Or do you disagree with transparency of taxpayer money?
Would it have
even been legally possible for F. to refuse the communication of her
tax-payer funded results?
For a while she actively campaigned against DNA being a double helix, see e.g. her 'obiturary' for the double helix [1] which preceeds Watson and Crick’s paper. Might her insistence that DNA is not a double helix have misled Wilkins and others?
[1] http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/fire-in-the-mind/files/201...