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Photo
51: Rosalind Franklin's astoundingly clear x-ray diffraction photograph of DNA
taken in 1952 which showed the telltale double-helical signature of DNA. The
photo received perhaps the ultimate pop cultural accolade when it became the
basis for "Photograph 51", a star power-driven play with Nicole
Kidman playing Franklin.
This photo is fascinating in many ways, perhaps most
controversially because Franklin's supervisor Maurice Wilkins (who she saw not
as a supervisor but as an equal) showed it to
James Watson without his knowledge: in Watson's account, when he saw it his
"jaw dropped and pulse raced". The pieces swirling around in his and
Francis Crick's mind fell in place and the rest was history.
The
image is also very intriguing because it points to one of the great what-ifs of
scientific history. Franklin was undoubtedly the best DNA crystallographer in
the world and there was nothing anywhere else that came close to the clarity of
this work, so the tantalizing question is: how soon would she have hit on the
idea of a double helix herself? My guess is, not too soon. As wronged as
Franklin was by the male establishment and history, she was stubborn and
defensive and not very open to other fields, especially chemistry and
model-building, the two fields which mattered the most for nailing down the
solution to the puzzle. Feeling besieged by the men around her, she was loath to collaborate. Much more than any raw brilliance, Watson and Crick's biggest
quality was their willingness to do whatever it takes and beg, borrow, ask -
and steal - from any field necessary to crack the structure. In the parlance of
Isaiah Berlin's parable, Franklin was a hedgehog, Watson and Crick were foxes.
If she had lived Franklin *should* most definitely have shared
in the Nobel Prize for the discovery of the helix: whether she *would* have is
another of the what-ifs of history, although given the male domination of
the prizes it seems unlikely. Sadly history silenced the question: Franklin
died in her 30s of cancer, an iconic figure to generations of future scientists
and female scientists in particular.
I don't see why Wilkins was included for the Nobel. Why not Jerry Donahue, for alerting W&C that the nucleotide bases exist in the keto rather than enol form? Their base pairing model wouldn't have worked otherwise.
ReplyDeleteAgree. Also Chargaff who had proposed the purine:pyrimidine constancy.
ReplyDeleteWhile the "photo" was important, I don't think it is as important as people may think. The numbers are the real important part here and as we all know Franklin had already presented them a few years earlier at a conference. You can only build the model by the help of those numbers not the photo itself. The photo has symbolic importance.
ReplyDeleteDisagree on Erwin Chargaff. He had no idea what his ratios meant or implied.
ReplyDeleteIn this he was exactly like Franklin, a virtuoso of his applied science, content to beaver away, tilling his furrow, with no inclination to look at the big picture and speculate about, oh, oh, let's call it THE
chemical problem of the 20thC.
Neither of them would have lowered themselves to 'playing with models' the way W&C did.
But Chargaff was really potentially close to figuring out the base pairing problem [just with the experimental data he'd amassed]. But he couldn't think outside the box.
Btw, both of them [Franklin & Chargaff] looked down on W&C-for not being chemists, like they were, and for pumping both of them for their data! The irony is that by NOT being chemists, they were free to use any knowledge/techniques which could prove useful, including their imaginations.
Of course the structure would have been articulated in the 1950's, but not with the explosive impact of W&C's April, 1953 Nature paper. Rather, it probably would have dribbled out in 3-4 more tightly scoped papers, with the integration performed after the fact.
ps love 'Curious Wavefunction'-one of the best science blogs, EVAH