'Photograph 51' asks: Did DNA pioneer Rosalind Franklin get the credit she deserves?
Did male scientists deprive Rosalind Franklin of her share of the credit for unraveling the mystery of DNA?
Did they steal her work?
Should her name also have been on the Nobel Prize awarded to Francis Crick, James Watson and Maurice Wilkins?
These questions are raised in Anna Ziegler's play "Photograph 51," which Renaissance Theaterworks begins performing Jan. 18, echoing arguments made by biographers and even some of Franklin's colleagues.
But "Photograph 51" also exposes the messy nature of science itself, a seemingly collaborative group process carried out by competitive individual egos who bring biases and assumptions into their relationships with colleagues.
In both its structure and its content, Ziegler's "Photograph 51" reminds us that what we know about science is partly a function of who gets to tell the story.
A crucial photograph
Given the prevalence of DNA in our lives today, from tailored medical treatments to genealogical databases, it's easy to forget how relatively recently its structure was unraveled.
Franklin played a crucial role in that unraveling. Born into a prosperous Jewish family in England, she showed both passion and aptitude for science early in life. During World War II, she did valuable research on coal and carbon, earning her doctorate and publishing scientific papers.
When Franklin returned to her native London in 1951 from a postdoctoral research position in Paris, the scientific community was still trying to understand how DNA worked.
A physical chemist by training, Franklin became a skilled X-ray crystallographer in Paris, using X-ray diffraction to take three-dimensional images of molecular structures. At King's College London, she expected to work on proteins but was switched before arrival to the DNA group. Inept communication about this change meant her relationship with Wilkins, the assistant lab chief and her nominal supervisor, began poorly and never really improved.
Wilkins and Franklin worked on separate forms of DNA, with Franklin supervising the work of a doctoral student, Raymond Gosling. Franklin upgraded both the equipment and technique used to make their DNA images. Gosling, working under Franklin's supervision, actually took the famous Photograph 51, whose X-shaped image would lead James Watson and Francis Crick to conceptualize DNA's structure as a double helix, the breakthrough that would lead to today's genetic treatments.
But Franklin didn't show Photograph 51 to Watson. Wilkins did, without Franklin's knowledge. Later, a different scientist shared an internal report Franklin had written with Watson and Crick, another crucial plank in their creation of an accurate model of DNA.
Without Franklin's data, Watson and Crick had "almost nothing," said the late biologist Lynne Osman Elkin in the "NOVA" documentary "Secret of Photo 51." "They were poised to figure it out, their work was brilliant, but they couldn't do it without Rosalind Franklin's data."
Downplaying her contribution
Watson and Crick were hurrying because they were competing against the brilliant Linus Pauling, also working on the mystery.
The duo attacked the problem by trying to build a model; the empirically minded Franklin tore apart their initial attempt. Only later, after seeing Photograph 51, did Watson and Crick correctly conceive DNA as a double helix, whose strands unzip for replication.
Watson and Crick published their landmark paper "Molecular Structure of Nucleic Acids" in the April 25, 1953, issue of the science journal Nature, with Wilkins and the Franklin-Gosling duo also publishing in the same issue. However, "Rosalind's part in the great discovery was obscured by a series of maneuvers made behind her back," said her biographer, Brenda Maddox, in the "NOVA" documentary.
At the end of their short paper, Watson and Crick write, "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."
"But in fact, they had particular knowledge of her work," said Sir John Maddox, a later Nature editor, in the "NOVA" documentary. "And I, as an editor, would have smelled a rat at that."
A life cut short
By the time those Nature papers appeared, Franklin was already working at a different London college on other research problems. Her work on the molecular structure of viruses increased her international reputation, but she died from ovarian cancer in 1958, at age 37. Her mentee Aaron Klug continued that viral research (winning a Nobel Prize himself in 1982).
Franklin might have become a footnote in the history of DNA if not, unintentionally, for Watson himself.
His popular book "The Double Helix: A Personal Account of the Discovery of the Structure of DNA" (1968) offended his colleagues with his portrayal of Franklin.
Watson takes shots at Franklin's dress and appearance:
"Though her features were strong, she was not unattractive and might have been quite stunning had she taken even a mild interest in clothes. This she did not. There was never lipstick to contrast with her straight black hair, while at the age of 31 her dresses showed all the imagination of English blue-stocking adolescents," Watson wrote.
Beyond his sexist comments, Watson also diminishes Franklin as a scientist while simultaneously acknowledging in a passing way that his breakthrough with Crick depended on her work: "By then it had been checked out with Rosy's precise measurements. Rosy, of course, did not directly give us her data."
Chastened by pre-publication criticism from his colleagues, Watson wrote more appreciatively about Franklin in an epilogue to his book. "The X-ray work she did at King's is increasingly regarded as superb," Watson wrote. More telling, he admits to realizing "years too late the struggles that the intelligent woman faces to be accepted by a scientific world which often regards women as mere diversions from serious thinking."
Other colleagues never doubted that Franklin was a serious thinker.
"She was a pretty tough person: single-minded, spoke what she believed and could, in fact, be quite fierce," said her mentee Klug in the "NOVA" documentary. "And if she had been a man, it would have gone totally unremarked."
One question that can't be answered was what Franklin would have thought of this wrangling about fame and credit. Maddox, her biographer, offered her opinion to "NOVA":
"Rosalind died at 37 with no sense of having been edged out in a race that only Watson and Crick knew was a race. She died proud of her world reputation in coal and virus research. She was cheated of the only thing she really wanted, which was a chance to finish her work. My view? Her lost prize was life."
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