Franklin missed the Nobel not only because she died young
She shot Photo 51 and was the first to see that DNA's two forms interconvert; but what really got her undercredited by history was that the King's College lab refused to share information, while Cambridge shared.
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What Cambridge gave women was a diploma, not a degree
Franklin entered Cambridge in 1938 to read natural sciences; at the time women across the university were capped at 500, confined to the two women's colleges, Newnham and Girton. She sat every exam and took a first in one year, but the university did not award women degrees, only diplomas, and she never attended a graduation ceremony. Patricia Farrar points out that what was truly hard was not the number of men but the attitude of ‘you don't belong here’ — at Cambridge they were merely ‘a presence’, not ordinary students.
— Patricia FarrarShe first turned coal from mysticism into something testable
In wartime, coal decided Britain's electricity and railways, but no one could say clearly why coal from different mines behaved differently. Franklin used gas to probe coal's porosity and found that some pores could only admit small molecules like helium while others could admit larger ones; after heating, some coal turned to graphite and some to a glass-like ‘glassy carbon’, the latter extremely valuable. Jim Naismith says her work let the mines predict, from a given coal, how it would perform under specific conditions without having to dig it out and try it first. This was single-author work during and after her PhD, and it was recognized as hers at the time.
— Jim NaismithOne DNA photo took 100 hours of exposure
Judith Howard describes the equipment of the day: X-ray tubes were fairly primitive, Franklin had to clean diffusion pumps herself with buckets of benzene to maintain vacuum, cameras were often homemade, and the sample — a lump of coal, a crystal or a fibre — had to be held by hand and aligned with the beam. Data could only be recorded on photographic film, and some of her later exposures of DNA fibres ran about 100 hours. Today data is collected digitally, computers are fast, and instruments are made by companies, but Howard stresses this is not a different science, only a different way of doing it.
— Judith HowardOne letter planted the hostility between her and Wilkins
Franklin was hired to work on proteins, then informed by a letter that she was being switched to DNA, and then that she would work with the PhD student Ray Gosling. But what Maurice Wilkins received was: she will join his team and work under him. On her first day at King's College, Wilkins happened to be on holiday. Patricia Farrar says Franklin believed she was independently in charge and was Gosling's doctoral supervisor, while Wilkins believed she worked for him, and this mismatch was the source of every problem over the following years. Their personal relations were also extremely poor, and Farrar judges that both sides were probably equally to blame.
— Patricia FarrarShe was shut out of the pub and the parties
Daily life at King's College was systematic isolation for Franklin: she was not allowed into the common room for lunch, the male colleagues went to the pub after work and she could not go, and parties did not invite her. Patricia Farrar says what is written in law is not the same as what actually happens, and attitude is the key. The only person always loyal was her PhD student Ray Gosling, and it was he who took the famous photograph; he admired her greatly. Farrar warns that these small daily exclusions can very quickly leave a person completely isolated.
— Patricia FarrarThe key to Photo 51 is B-form DNA
Jim Naismith explains that Wilkins had already taken DNA photographs, with samples from Switzerland of unprecedented quality, but the early images were complex and hard to interpret. Franklin's distinctive contribution was working out that the two forms of DNA — A (dehydrated, twisted, shorter) and B (hydrated, swollen) — could interconvert, and Photo 51 was of the B form. The helical structure of the B form is very obvious, and as soon as Watson saw it and the measurements in it, he made that leap. Naismith uses the analogy of a soaked towel: wring the water out and it gets shorter and twisted, that is the A form; soak it full and it swells, that is the B form.
— Jim NaismithShe was tied to the A form and missed the B-form helix
Jim Naismith offers an explanation contrary to the popular ‘Franklin lacked imagination’ story: she was assigned to the A form at the time, Wilkins to the B form, and Photo 51 was a B-form result that she did not take seriously enough. Add to that the King's College team's refusal to cooperate, and if everyone had seen that photograph the outcome might have been different. The A form itself does not show obvious helical features, and she worried that it only became helical on converting from A to B, so she was reserved about the helical structure. Crick and Watson chose to ignore the distinction. She was still the first to recognize that the A and B forms could interconvert with humidity.
— Jim NaismithThe Nobel rules mean even a living Franklin might not have won
Patricia Farrar gives two technical reasons: Franklin had already died when the Nobel was announced, and the Nobel is awarded only to the living; and the Nobel can go to at most three people. Farrar says that if she had lived, she would like to believe the prize would have gone to Watson, Crick and Franklin. But she stresses it is hard to put ‘a number’ on her contribution, because at the time information came from many directions — spectroscopy, biochemistry, different methods studying the same material — it was one piece of a jigsaw.
— Patricia FarrarVirus research was her independently completed signature work
After leaving King's College, Franklin went to Bernal's lab at Birkbeck to study tobacco mosaic virus. Judith Howard says the atmosphere there was completely different, and drawing on the experience she had accumulated she obtained single-crystal samples and took excellent photographs. Jim Naismith adds that viruses are fascinating because they are not alive yet transmit information, and Franklin worked out how the protein coat was organized and where the nucleic acid sat inside the virus, a key question for understanding virus structure. Howard notes that across her whole shortened career, people nonetheless fixate on less than two years of DNA work.
— Judith HowardIn their own words · checked verbatim
What mattered isn't the number of men. It's the attitudes towards the women.
Patricia Farrar7:10
So right from the very beginning, Rosalind Franklin assumed she was working on her own in charge of Ray Gosling. She was his PhD supervisor. So Wilkins chose to assume that she was working with him and for him, and that was the source of all the problems that ensued over the next few years.
Patricia Farrar25:49
And I think it also represents two different ways of approaching science. And we tend to celebrate Watson and Crick because precisely they made this imaginative leap.
Patricia Farrar32:55
She was tied to A form. This was a B form result. She didn't give it the attention that she should have done. And that team in Kings wouldn't work as a team. Had they all looked at that, it might have been different.
Jim Naismith33:55
But I think that what was the problem was she was never given the credit at the time as to how important that image was.
Jim Naismith36:58
I get the impression that she would have liked to be remembered not as a woman, but as a scientist who did very, very important work in DNA, in coal, in the tobacco mosaic virus.
Patricia Farrar44:06
One thing that's missed is what a kind person she was, and she made lots of friends in science.
Jim Naismith48:19
Figures
| Cambridge's cap on women students at the time | 500, 10% of the university | 6:05 |
| The form of degree Franklin received at Cambridge | A diploma, not a degree | 7:10 |
| Exposure time for Franklin's DNA fibre photographs | About 100 hours | 16:34 |
| Age at which Franklin died | 37 | 42:02 |
| Number of single-author papers Franklin published while at Cambridge | 5 | 41:01 |
| Maximum number of people who can share a Nobel Prize | 3 | 37:59 |
| Type of cancer Franklin had | Ovarian cancer | 42:02 |
| Franklin's examination after returning from the US in 1956 | 1956 | 43:03 |
Glossary
- X-ray crystallography
- The discipline of shining X-rays at a crystal and inferring the arrangement of atoms from the diffraction pattern.
- Photo 51
- The X-ray diffraction photograph of B-form DNA taken by Franklin and Gosling, directly showing the helical structure.
- A-form / B-form DNA
- Two conformations of DNA: the A form is dehydrated and shorter; the B form is hydrated and swollen, with a more obvious helical character.
- space group
- In crystallography, the classification describing the internal symmetry of a crystal; Crick used it to infer that DNA's two strands run in opposite directions.
- tobacco mosaic virus
- The virus Franklin studied after leaving King's College, for which she determined the protein coat and the position of the nucleic acid.
How to listen
Readers interested in the history of science, the situation of women in research, and how DNA was discovered; anyone who wants to understand how Nobel rules and lab politics shape credit allocation.
The first two minutes or so are ads and show introductions for other BBC podcasts; skippable.