Re:How did Rosalind Franklin miss the helix in her iconic DN...
by skew-aberration on Thursday October 08, 2026 @09:00AM
(#50005323)
Wilkins was immediately convinced of helix from his earlier work; double helix was only arrived at later by Franklin (and Crick interpreting Franklin's work) because they were the only ones in this group who understood x-ray diffraction math. She mocked him after her own helix images were taken, because she believed the more complicated images of the A-DNA form (well beyond his skillset) held all the real secrets.
Re:How did Rosalind Franklin miss the helix in her iconic DN...
by prmph on Thursday October 08, 2026 @11:45AM
(#50007242)
Sounds like none from the entire cast of characters in this affair were/are without blame.
Re:How did Rosalind Franklin miss the helix in her iconic DN...
by shevy-java on Thursday October 08, 2026 @12:15PM
(#50007704)
Crick stands quite supreme in that drama though. The others could form supervillains, like Lex Luther. Would have been interesting to see Crick and Pauling as a team. Pauling would have figured out the structure with the whole dataset IMO. I think he did not have the full dataset that Crick and Watson had available, due to Wilkins. It may be more fair to name all five as discovers though, even if only Crick and Watson got the main credit.
Re:How did Rosalind Franklin miss the helix in her iconic DN...
by wisty on Thursday October 08, 2026 @11:35PM
(#50015688)
Franklin and Wilkins weren't bad, they just didn't get on very well. Wilkins was a bit sensitive and Franklin was arrogant; but neither were really bad people. Wilkins later gave Franklin a lot more credit, he was just a bit peeved off at the time.
People do look a bit funny at Watson though ... he apparently became a bit of a crackpot in later years.
Re:How did Rosalind Franklin miss the helix in her iconic DN...
by ecshafer on Thursday October 08, 2026 @11:01AM
(#50006656)
Wilkins is the one who seemed to get shafted the most in history. Franklin honestly seems like she barely did anything in the actual DNA discovery, and got all of the inferences wrong.
Re:How did Rosalind Franklin miss the helix in her iconic DN...
by skew-aberration on Thursday October 08, 2026 @08:01PM
(#50014140)
Franklin made the phosphates-on-the-outside discovery first. That was a detail the others got wrong. She also made the images good enough to see C2 symmetry in A-DNA, which was key to inferring double helix (though there was chemical evidence of this too), but she was late to developing that idea and got scooped.
Wilkins produced the initial samples, trained Gosling (who took photo 51) and then had his samples and assistant (Gosling) taken when the high flying Franklin was hired.
Wilkins took lower quality photos before Franklin was even in the lab, and showed them to Watson at a conference.
Yes, Franklin built a way better x-ray camera.
But she was also allegedly pretty horrid to Wilkins. She mocked Wilkins as a "middle class" idiot and refused to share her data with him (Gosling did show Wilkins photo 51 when ordered by higher ups, which Gosling had taken, we don't talk about Gosling because PhD students don't get credit right?).
Franklin held a funeral for the double helix, because I guess she thought Wilkins was an idiot to suggest DNA was a double helix.
Yeah, Wilkins was a little bit rude, giving as little credit to her as possible. But if some privileged upper-class rockstar moves into your lab, tries to freeze you out, mocks you for your theory, then you figure out you can prove your theory is correct (using a photo your former assistant took using the rockstar's camera, and some help from a couple of other researchers) then yeah ... are you really going out of your way to praise them, even if maybe they could have eventually figured it out?