On Thursday, we read Chapter 10 of James Watson's award-winning book Double Helix about his role in the race to uncover the structure of DNA. In this chapter, as in the whole book, Watson's account doesn't always jibe with the rest of his peers who were also involved in the race. He particularly singles out Rosalind Franklin for ridicule. Much of his fame is the result of using information from her research (x-ray crystallography of DNA geometric structure) to make his and Crick's final successful physical models of the DNA double helix. Additionally, Franklin died of cancer several years before Watson and Crick won the Nobel Prize in 1962 and the book's publication in 1968. Is it a coincidence, then, that it was Franklin who was so harshly singled out? Franklin was also a successful and hard-to-intimidate woman in science, which was a rarity at that time, and she often faced a hostile and sexist culture in the world of science research.
Here's a link to the short NOVA movie: "Secret of Photo 51"
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