The sad thing about this is that, despite this clarification, in schools, it'll still be taught as a Watson/Crick discovery, not Franklin, just as the telephone is still taught as a Bell invention rather than something he stole while working at the patent office and Edison gets credit for the light bulb even though he was a johnny-come-lately. Once these things are in print, it's hard to get them changed. I remember once in school being taught something (don't remember what it was) and sticking my hand up to say, "but that's not right. We now know X to be true." The teacher said, "But it's that way in the book, so that's how it'll be on your exams."
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?
Wilkins was immediately convinced of helix from his earlier work; double helix was only arrived at later by Franklin (and Crick interpreting Franklin's work) because they were the only ones in this group who understood x-ray diffraction math. She mocked him after her own helix images were taken, because she believed the more complicated images of the A-DNA form (well beyond his skillset) held all the real secrets.
Crick stands quite supreme in that drama though. The others could form supervillains, like Lex Luther. Would have been interesting to see Crick and Pauling as a team. Pauling would have figured out the structure with the whole dataset IMO. I think he did not have the full dataset that Crick and Watson had available, due to Wilkins. It may be more fair to name all five as discovers though, even if only Crick and Watson got the main credit.
Franklin and Wilkins weren't bad, they just didn't get on very well. Wilkins was a bit sensitive and Franklin was arrogant; but neither were really bad people. Wilkins later gave Franklin a lot more credit, he was just a bit peeved off at the time.
People do look a bit funny at Watson though ... he apparently became a bit of a crackpot in later years.
Wilkins is the one who seemed to get shafted the most in history. Franklin honestly seems like she barely did anything in the actual DNA discovery, and got all of the inferences wrong.
Franklin made the phosphates-on-the-outside discovery first. That was a detail the others got wrong. She also made the images good enough to see C2 symmetry in A-DNA, which was key to inferring double helix (though there was chemical evidence of this too), but she was late to developing that idea and got scooped.
Attribution and glory-sharing is a tricky thing. The discovery was piecemeal and has a lot of names attached. For a lot of reasons, some her own, some the sexist institution she was part of, she did not publish first. Watson and Crick did. Even though they were privy to what she knew, and had seen Photo 51, and only briefly reference Wilkins/Franklin from KCL that gave them key insights... they published first.
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.
Arnold's principle (after Vladimir Arnold) says that no invention is attributed correctly to its true inventor. The principle applies to itself, of course.
Bell didn’t steal the invention. There were many people working on it at the same time, but he and Watson were the first to actually a) patent it, and b) demonstrate it functionally.
While I wouldn't go as far as claiming Bell stole the patent, that he filed his patent within hours of Elisha Grey is so fortuitous a coinicidence that one can't help but wonder if it weren't a coincidence.
Pedantic aside: the word "fortuitous" means "happened completely by chance", which is the opposite of what you seem to be implying here. You probably want a word like "incredible" or "unlikely" instead.
> 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
"People object" because it's confusing to use the word 'fortuitous' (which means accidental) if 'fortunate' (which means lucky) is intended, unless the situation happens to also be accidental and the goal is to highlight the chance aspect. I wouldn't "insist" about this, unless working as a copyeditor, but many uses of the word "fortuitous" make it clear that the speaker/writer doesn't really know what the word means, and it often ends up sounding pretentious when people use "fancy" uncommon words incorrectly.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
The fact is that after taking that image, she spent some 8+ months on a completely different research direction that yielded no results (A-DNA). She was not the first to take a picture showing helical structure (Wilkins' lab hired her after they had done this, and Pauling inferred helix from even earlier cruder images). She was the last person in the group to be convinced that A-DNA was also helical, and that it was time to start building molecular models. She is on the record mocking Wilkins for his non-specialist confidence in the simple helical structure, during the period she had Photo 51. She was yet to even attempt to model how base pairs (complimentary or otherwise) would fit together in the anti-parallel double helix phosphates-outside model she had by the time they published.
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.
I don’t know if it just depends on the state but I’m 29 years old and i learned the true inventors/scientists behind both of these in public school, and I went to school in NV which regularly scores near or at the bottom nationwide.
Shifting reputational fortunes. He definitely had his issues but this modern geek caricature of him as some sort of opportunistic nasty is not justified by the historic record. The man contributed to human society, unquestionably.
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.
People seem to really simple, strong narratives. It used to be that Edison was a titanic genius who invented countless things solely through his own brilliance and hard work. Now he's some kind of scheming con man who did nothing but steal the work of others. Nuance is not popular.
There's an awful lot or Franklin in print and the like, maybe more than she really deserves as it seems to have become the most famous story of alleged sex discrimination in science.
