Succeeding in a Man’s World
The Illustrious Career and Tragedy of Rosalind Franklin
Was Rosalind Franklin the victim of a male conspiracy, denied the accolades she deserved by a jealous patriarchy? Or did she fail to appreciate the results of her own work, thereby enabling two men, James Watson and Francis Crick, to take the honours for discovering the structure of DNA? It’s a question that has been discussed for over half a century and neither position is correct. But to even ask the question is to overlook and diminish everything else that Rosalind Franklin achieved, both as a scientist and as one of the first women to break into the male-dominated world of science.
Rosalind Franklin was born in 1920, into a prosperous and well-known Jewish family. The family was deeply immersed in communal and public affairs; her father, Ellis Franklin, a merchant banker, was vice-principal of the Working Men’s College and Treasurer of the Jewish Board of Guardians; her mother, Muriel, chaired committees dedicated to the welfare of those in need. They were politically involved too. One of her great-uncles, Herbert Samuel, had been the first British High Commissioner to Palestine, her great-aunt, Netta Montagu, was a leading suffragette and educational reformer who sat on the National Council of Women. Another great-uncle, Hugh, was more militant; also a campaigner for the Suffragette movement, he was sent to prison several times, most notably for setting fire to a train and for trying to horsewhip Winston Churchill. The whole family, dozens of them, all lived within a few streets of each other in London’s fashionable Notting Hill and Bayswater where Rosalind’s great-grandfather had been a founder of the New West End Synagogue.
In 1938 Rosalind won a place at Newnham College in Cambridge to study Chemistry. She graduated in 1941 but did not receive a degree, Cambridge did not start to award bachelor degrees to women until 1948, the last university in Britain to do so. She was, however, awarded a graduate research scholarship, and studied for her PhD during World War Two by investigating the molecular structure of coal. Coal was an essential commodity during the war, used both as a fuel and in the charcoal filters of gas masks; her research was intended to increase its efficiency in both areas.
Franklin conducted her research through X-Ray crystallography, a relatively new technique allowing scientists to look in minute detail at how materials are formed. She became an expert in the use of the technique, published five scholarly papers and was awarded her PhD in in 1945. She was already attracting attention in the scientific community and in 1947 received an offer to work at the National Chemical Laboratory in Paris.
She lived a frugal life in France. Her family could easily afford to support her but she refused to accept money from them, choosing instead to live on the small salary she received from the laboratory. She spent four years in France, making many friends, going on cycling and walking holidays with them, calling Paris “far and away the best city in the world.” She published more papers and may easily have settled permanently into a French way of life but came under pressure from her family to return to England, where there were greater scientific opportunities. Kings College London offered her a position and she came home.
Her time at Kings College was not happy. She had been employed to use her skills in X-Ray diffraction, joining a pioneering team investigating the structure of DNA, the molecule that carries genetic information for nearly all living organisms. However, she found herself embroiled in conflict almost as soon as she joined. The head of department who engaged her neglected to tell his deputy, Maurice Wilkins, that he had taken her on. Wilkins, who was leading the DNA research was on holiday when she joined, on his return he assumed she had been employed as his assistant and treated her as such. That wasn’t the case, her position placed her on an equal footing with him and it created a tension between them that was never resolved.
There were personality issues too; Rosalind was lively, argumentative and ambitious, Wilkins was shy and retiring. It was hard enough for her to be one of not many Jews and even fewer women in the college; having to work with Wilkins made life at Kings unbearable.
Before Rosalind joined the team, Wilkins had discovered that DNA could exist in two different forms, signified as A and B. Rosalind subsequently showed that the A form could be converted to the B form simply by increasing the humidity in its atmosphere. She took a photograph of an X-ray image of the B form. Known as Photograph 51, it proved to be a crucial and controversial element in the scientific understanding of DNA.
Unknown to Franklin, Wilkins showed a copy of Photography 51 to two scientists in Cambridge, Francis Crick and James Watson. They too were seeking to discover the structure of DNA. And it is at this point that the historical record becomes cloudy. Pages and pages have been written about what happened but the fundamental issue is whether Rosalind Franklin’s Photograph 51 was instrumental in helping Watson and Crick to discover the structure of DNA, or whether it simply confirmed what they already knew.
This all happened in 1953 but the controversy didn’t really break out until 1968, when James Watson published a book, The Double Helix, in which he arrogantly dismissed Rosalind Franklin in misogynistic terms. Watson’s book caused an outcry. Particularly since he wrote: “Rosy, of course, did not directly give us her data. For that matter, no one at King's realized they were in our hands.”
It was too much for her supporters. Watson, Crick and Wilkins had all received the Nobel Prize in 1962 for their work in the discovery of the structure of DNA and Rosalind’s supporters cried that she had been robbed of her award. They said it was because she was a woman, and because her Photograph 51 had been stolen. They claimed that it was she, not the three men, who was the true figure behind the discovery. Others refuted the claim, saying that Rosalind had failed to interpret the photograph properly: she’d had the opportunity to discover DNA’s structure but ad not been up to the task.
Unfortunately, the argument was overdone on both sides. Rosalind Franklin had never made any claim to the discovery; indeed when Watson and Crick published their findings in the journal Nature, she published an article alongside it stating that her ideas were “not inconsistent with the model proposed by Watson and Crick.” And far from feeling she had been robbed by the men, she later became a friend of Crick and his wife, touring Spain with them in 1956 and recuperating at their Cambridge home when she was ill.
As to why she didn’t receive the Nobel Prize, it wasn’t because she was a woman. Nobel Prizes are only awarded to living people, and by 1962 Rosalind Franklin was no longer alive. She had tragically died of cancer in 1958, at the young age of 37.
The controversy over DNA and Photograph 51 is now the topic for which Rosalind Franklin is best remembered. It is a shame, because her work after Photograph 51 was just as important, if not more so. She left Kings after 2 years, unhappy because of her poor relationship with Wilkins and increasingly disillusioned by the college’s treatment of women - she was not even allowed to join her male colleagues for lunch in the dining room. She took up a position at Birkbeck College, a much more open-minded environment in those days. She led a team of researchers investigating the structure of the Tobacco Mosaic Virus, the first virus ever to have been discovered, used by scientists as prototype for further viral investigation. Her expertise in the study of viruses, including polio, laid the foundations for future research, helping scientists to develop anti-viral treatments and new vaccines, including that against Covid, so rapidly produced during the pandemic. Franklin described her work on organic cells as “probably the most fundamental of all questions concerning the mechanism of living processes.”
As befits a woman who succeeded in her struggle to establish herself in a male domain, Rosalind Franklin has now become an icon. The Rosalind Franklin Institute in England is a national medical research centre, the Rosalind Franklin Society showcases women who have made a substantial contribution to science, there is a laboratory named after her at Birkbeck College and a university bearing her name in Chicago. With her family’s suffragette background she was probably always aware of the struggle for women’s rights, but, rather than campaigning, she got on with showing what women could do.
Rosalind Franklin is buried in Willesden Jewish Cemetery in London. Her tombstone reads. “Scientist. Her research and discoveries remain of lasting benefit to mankind.”