On the 70th anniversary of the publication of the seminal papers detailing the DNA double helix, we have new insight into the discovery of DNA's structure. Most of us believe that the University of Cambridge scientists James Watson's and Francis Crick's Nobel prize-winning finding was made using data stolen from Rosalind Franklin, a physical chemist at King's College London. However, this dramatic data heist is a work of fiction that wholly underestimates Franklin's intelligence (see BioNews 1188).
Hosting the BBC podcast is Gaia Vince, who interviews three distinct experts on this story. Professor Matthew Cobb, zoologist at the University of Manchester, who is writing a biography on Crick; Professor Nathaniel Comfort, American historian at Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland, who is writing a biography on Watson; and Professor Angela Creager, biochemist at Princeton University, New Jersey, who has written extensively on Franklin.
Professor Creager first introduces us to Franklin as an impressive chemist and physicist, gaining an undergraduate degree in natural sciences from the University of Cambridge. She continued her studies at Cambridge, obtaining her PhD in physical chemistry during World War II for her imperative work on coal. Following this, she moved to Paris for a postdoctoral position under Jacques Mering, the world's leading X-ray crystallographer at the time. X-ray crystallography would become Franklin's life work and provide us with some of the earliest images that demonstrated DNA's helical structure, including the infamous Photograph 51.
Depressingly, this remains an incredible career trajectory for a woman in science even today, however, for the 1940s it is particularly inconceivable. Professor Creager suggests that this was due to Franklin's 'feisty' nature, a term I resent being reserved only for women.
Franklin then moved back to the UK to work on DNA at King's College London with Professor Sir John Randall. Astonishingly, this was Franklin's first foray into biology of any kind. Here, Professor Creager details that Franklin was told she would be the only person researching DNA. However, another scientist in Professor Randall's lab, Maurice Wilkins, was also working on DNA but was absent during this meeting. This ultimately led to terrible animosity between Franklin and Wilkins, made worse by their clashing personalities.
Shamefully, I had never heard of Wilkins. Or if I had, I don't remember him. However, he shared the Nobel prize with Watson and Crick for the discovery of the DNA double helix. At first, I was perturbed by this because, like most, I believe that Franklin should also have been awarded the prize in 1962. However, she had unfortunately passed away from ovarian cancer in 1958 and Nobel prizes were not awarded posthumously until 1974. But I was interested to learn that Wilkins had independently discovered that DNA was helical using X-ray diffraction techniques. You can read about this in more detail in an article published by Professor Cobb and Professor Comfort in Nature just prior the release of this podcast.
In contrast to Wilkins' bad relationship with Franklin, we discover that he was incredibly close to Watson and Crick. It was likely Wilkins' dislike for Franklin that later informed Watson's own accounts of her, as he did not know Franklin particularly well. Professor Comfort describes that the first public account of the discovery of DNA's structure came from Watson's peculiar 1968 book, The Double Helix. It is here at that Watson chronicles seeing Franklin's data, namely Photograph 51. He implies that Franklin could not understand her own data for what it was, and yet he was instantly able to recognise its importance. He claims it is this eureka moment that ultimately led to his and Crick's 1953 seminal paper.
However, this account, according to Professor Comfort, was pure fiction. Watson would not have been able to appreciate the structure of DNA just from one image – especially as he had no crystallography experience himself. This narrative undermines both he and Crick as scientists, but also implies that Franklin was not intelligent enough to comprehend the science herself, which was untrue.
Both Franklin and Wilkins were skilled experimental scientists who independently deduced that DNA was a helical structure. Professor Cobb tells us that Crick and Watson, on the other hand, were more theoretical scientists; they would fiddle with cardboard models of DNA nucleotides to see how they would fit together, and discuss big ideas over pints in their local pub. It was ultimately the realisation of base pairing, that A always binds with T, and C always with G, that allowed the Cambridge pair's model to fit together perfectly, in a double helix. This discovery was made more impressive when Professor Cobb explained that Crick was still a PhD student at this time, and DNA was not even his project. The way Professor Cobb put it, Crick liked problem solving, and would regularly finish other people's crosswords.
We learn that the King's College London and University of Cambridge scientists collaborated and shared their data more than we were led to believe. The scientists would openly send each other their findings and ask for feedback. This is reflected in the three back-to-back studies published in Nature in 1953, published by Watson and Crick, Wilkins and his colleagues, and Franklin and her student Raymond Gosling.
Watson and Crick had concluded that DNA was helical but relied on Franklin's experimental data to confirm their theory. In the paper, they stated that they had been 'stimulated by a knowledge of the general nature of the unpublished experimental results and ideas' of the King's College scientists. Later, in a paper published in 1954, Watson and Crick recognise that 'the formulation of our structure would have been most unlikely, if not impossible,' without Franklin's data.
So, the podcast painted a different picture of Franklin than the one we're used to. Instead of being a victim of data theft, Franklin was an equal contributor to the discovery of the structure of DNA. She, like Watson, Crick, and Wilkins, would have been recognised for this by the Nobel committee, if she was alive at the time the award was given. But, the way Professor Creager put it, DNA was only a chapter in Franklin's life. She started her own lab at Birkbeck university and performed ground-breaking work on viral structures.
Although I was pleased to learn about Franklin's impressive career, I had expected to hear more on Watson's fall from grace. Vince tentatively alluded to eugenics being tied to the discovery of DNA's structure, but the topic changed quickly. Watson, now 95, still upholds his belief in eugenics. He has made repeated remarks conflating intelligence with race. These comments finally saw the scientist stripped of his titles from Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in 2019. They are also likely the reason for me carrying out my PhD at the Francis Crick Institute, and not the Watson and Crick Institute. I would have liked the team to have reminded the public of this detail, and I question the purpose of Professor Comfort's biography on Watson.
Although the podcast predominantly focused on setting the story straight on Franklin, the group then discussed how the structure of DNA itself was relatively useless until the advent of genetic engineering. DNA is an inert molecule; it is RNA and protein that are the building blocks of life.
Vince finished by asking the experts their worries about genetic engineering. Professor Cobb has repeatedly made public his fears on editing the human genome (see BioNews 1138) . Apparently, this fear was common when Watson and Crick won the Nobel prize. Professor Cobb said that back then 'it was science fiction, but now it is science fact' – a eugenicist's dream come true.
Ultimately, I enjoyed the podcast and found the new information uncovered by Professors Cobb and Comfort extremely interesting. I hope their work goes a long way to change how history remembers Franklin – and Wilkins.
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