SYMHC Classics: Rosalind Franklin, DNA's Dark Lady

We're reaching back to 2011 for an episode from Sarah and Deblina about a woman scientist. The men who are usually credited with discerning DNA's structure won the Nobel Prize in 1962, but they used Rosalind Franklin's research. In 1952, she captured the best DNA image available at the time, and the Nobel winners used it without her knowledge.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
Happy Saturday everyone. Today we are going back to eleven
for Sarah and Deblina's episode on Rosalind Franklin and her
research into the structure of DNA and why for a
long time that work went unrecognized. Enjoying, Welcome to stuff
you missed in history class, the production of I Heart
Radios How Stuff Works. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.

(00:30):
I'm Deblin a chalkateboarding and I'm and even if you're
not a science person at all, you probably know something
about d n A. That's stuff in our cells that
carries the cells genetic information and basically determines all of
our individual hereditary characteristics, hair color, eye color, the whole deal.
So if you watch TV, you probably know at least

(00:50):
that much. But most of us probably have at least
touched on the subject in high school too, or will
touch on it in high school. Will not to rule
out our younger listeners, and we recognize what DNA looks like,
that unmistakable double helix that looks like a twisting ladder
or a spiral staircase. I remember actually modeling it in
middle school cleaners. So maybe some of our younger listeners

(01:13):
already knew well the people credited and most high school
and middle school textbooks, at least when I was in school,
which admittedly was a while ago. Um, the people credited
with discovering the structure of DNA are James Watson and
Francis Crick. That's one of those associations that kind of
has stuck in my mind over the years. You know,
it's like Darwin and natural selection and Watson and Crick

(01:34):
in DNA. And after all, they, along with Maurice Wilkins,
received the Nobel Prize in Medicine for this discovery in
nineteen sixty two, so it makes sense that their names
would be most associated with this accomplishment. But especially in
recent years, some more attention has been paid to someone
else who may deserve a great deal of the credit
for the discovery of DNA structure, and that's a British
physical chemist named Rosalind Franklin. So Franklin's involvement in this

(01:59):
DNA to discovery has caused quite a bit of controversy
in the science world for a number of reasons. So
number one, it's without question that her research played a
really big role in helping suss out DNA's structure. But
because She died four years before Watson, Crick, and Wilkins
even received the Nobel Prize. The prize only honors living scientists,

(02:22):
so she sat for this year except for this year.
Except for this year. There was Ralph Steinman. Did you
hear about that? He won the prize for medicine? And
I think the announcement was made three days after his death.
So they went ahead, and they went ahead and let
it stand because they had made the decision before they
even knew he was dead. So so well then up
until the until then. Um so yeah, they are more

(02:44):
associated with it because they won the award for it,
and Watson and Crick's famous nineteen fifty three paper detailing
their discoveries in the journal Nature, they only gave Franklin
the tiniest credit, and so consequently she's virtually or has
been virtually unknown for this accomplished. That's the second reason.
And then the third is in his nineteen sixty eight

(03:07):
but chronicling the discovery called the double helix. Appropriately enough,
Watson noted the role Franklin's research played and also revealed
that it played a role without Franklin's knowledge. That's a
pretty big one there, sketchy, so you can see where
the controversy comes in. This revelation raised a number of questions.

(03:27):
For instance, did Watson and Crick steal Franklin's research and
if they didn't, would she have figured it out? Would
she have figured out DNA structure on her own? So
we're going to address these questions and more as we
take a look at what really went down in England
in nineteen fifty three when this particular discovery was made.
But first we're going to take a look at another

(03:49):
relevant question here. Who was Rosalind Franklin really So in
Watson's book The Double Helix, he kind of dissed Franklin
a little bit, basically depicted her as stubborn and hard
to work with, an unfeminine, but other people who knew
her really characterized her in a different way. What we
do know personality aside, is that she had a passion

(04:10):
for science from the very start. She was born Rosalind
Elsie Franklin in London, England, on July and of course,
most girls around that time were expected to have very
few goals outside of becoming successful wives and mothers. But
Franklin's parents, Ellis Franklin, and Muriel Walie Franklin were more

(04:32):
progressive and really encouraged their daughter academically. They even enrolled
young Franklin in the St. Paul's School for Girls, which
was one of the few schools at the time that
offered physics and chemistry lessons to female students. And Franklin
really excelled in these courses, and she decided by the
age of fifteen that she really wanted a career in science,

(04:53):
even though her parents wanted her to pursue social work instead.
So she enrolled Newnham College at the University of Cambridge
in nineteen thirty eight and was one of only five
hundred women in a class of more than five thousand.
She earned a bachelor's degree in Natural sciences with a
specialty in physical chemistry in nineteen forty one. And we
should stop here for just one second, when we have

(05:14):
noted her scientific achievements or her initial ones, to give
a little disclaimer and say that we are not scientists
here and do not have degrees in science, so we're
going to be kind of vague about some of the
concepts that we explain here, and hopefully listeners will forgive
us for that well, And part of it too, is
to focus on the people in the story involved, because
story sometimes if you get to bog down in the

(05:36):
other details, you miss out on some of that. Y'all
can easily find out scientific details on this. So continuing
on with Franklin's life. After earning her bachelor's degree, she
got a research scholarship in the study of gas phase
chromatography with the chemist Ronald G. W. Norrish, who was
a future Nobel Prize winner himself. But the progression of

(05:57):
World War Two and the fact that Franklin found Nourish
kind of difficult to work with, changed her course of
study a little bit. According to Encyclopedia Britannica, she served
as an air raid warden in London and also left
her job with Nourrish in nineteen forty two to do
war related work as a researcher with the British Coal
Utilization Research Association that's kind of a mouthful in southern England,

(06:22):
and while she was there she worked on studying the
physical chemistry of carbon and coal, and the work she
did ultimately led to some really enlightening ideas about coal structure.
So a little bit of foreshadowing almost of work she'd
do later. She also learned the basics of molecular biology
and crystallography while she was there, and her work earned
her a PhD from Cambridge in nineteen forty five. She

(06:45):
also authored five coal related papers that are still cited today.
Before nineteen forty nine, According to an article by Lynn
Osmond Elkin in Physics Today, Franklin's papers quote changed the
way physical chemists of view the micro structure of coals
and related substances. So Franklin's work, in addition to getting
some praise by current scientists, got her another job offer.

(07:09):
In she moved to Paris to work at the Central
Laboratory of Chemical Services, where under Jacques Marrying, she learned
to use a technique called X ray diffraction when working
with crystalline matter like coal. And just to give you
a basic rundown of that, X ray diffraction allows scientists
to see the three dimensional structures of molecules by blasting

(07:31):
a crystal with X ray, so the rays bounce off
the atoms and diffract in different directions, and the escaping
X rays exposed photographic film to create this kind of
shadow of the molecule, and then scientists interpret the photo
to reveal the molecule shape and its measurements, and you know,
allows them to look at it on a closer level.

(07:53):
So Franklin used these techniques to discover a lot of
details about the structure of carbon, even as it's heated
and changes into other forms. They're not just carbon in
a static state, but transforming. So Franklin was doing good

(08:17):
work in Paris, and by most accounts, the three years
or so that she was there were the happiest ones
of her life. According to that Physics Today article by Elkin,
Franklin had friends in her Paris lab and would hang
out with them sometimes do things like going hiking, and
she became fluent in French and skilled in French cooking,
and just became really comfortable with her life there. It
provides a really stark contrast for the next period of

(08:40):
her life that we're going to talk about, the one
in which DNA takes center stage. So now that I've
set that up, I should go right and telling you
all about it, I guess. So, even though Franklin was
happy in Paris, she got lured away by the offer
of a research fellowship from Sir John T. Randall's medical
research Council at King's College in London, and also the

(09:00):
chance to work on one of the major scientific challenges
of the moment, figuring out the structure and function of DNA,
and Randall especially wanted Franklin to use the X ray
diffraction techniques that she had mastered to produce diffraction pictures
of d N A. But when Randall brought her in,
Maurice Wilkins, a British biophysicist who had been working in
the same lab on the same project, was not happy

(09:22):
to have her around. They didn't work well together and
ended up disliking each other the entire time. They worked
together pretty much right off the bat, yeah, and biographers
have had a hard time figuring out why exactly Wilkins
and Franklin didn't get along. Somethink it's because he happened
to be a way traveling when Franklin got hired and
started her job, so when he returned, Wilkins originally thought

(09:45):
that she was working for him. Another point of contention
is that Franklin, of course had other ideas. She knew
she wasn't gonna be working for Wilkins, she assumed that
she'd be working independently. She thought she was the bosson
page exactly, so they both had flicting ideas of who
is boss. And she also had more experience with X
ray diffraction techniques of course, I mean that was why

(10:06):
she was brought in in the first place and kind
of forged ahead and took the lead with that, so
Wilkins might have felt that his project was being taken
away from him to some degree. Franklin was also said
to have a very serious, direct, and even argumentative style
when it came to her work, and Wilkins did not
take well to this. It said that when she argued

(10:27):
with him, he would really just shut down and kind
of give her the silent treatment. He just wouldn't respond,
So they didn't have a functioning relationship, not at all.
So this rivalry is probably one of the main reasons
that Franklin was so unhappy at King's College, and some
have theorized that her unhappiness was also related to sexism
towards female employees at Kings, saying that women weren't even

(10:50):
allowed to eat lunch in the same dining rooms as men.
But there's been some new ideas on that theory. Yeah,
I mean, you see that mentioned a lot the whole
lunching that they were excluded somehow from eating lunch with
their fellow scientists. But researchers such as Random Attics, a
Franklin biographer, have found in recent years that the working
environment at King's College was actually more welcoming to female

(11:13):
scientists than some have portrayed it to be. They actually
did get to eat lunch in the same room. So
Maddox thinks that Franklin's class and religion she was Jewish
and came from a wealthy family, may have actually made
her feel more out of place than anything else. And
though her demeanor in the lab was serious and sometimes abrasive,
many of her colleagues remember her as being witty, bright, interesting,

(11:35):
even fun in the lab, though of course Franklin was
all business and her rivalry with Wilkins didn't stop her
from investigating DNA fibers at all. Pretty soon after she
got to King's College, Franklin, working along with a student
named Raymond Gosling, managed to get some preliminary diffraction images
of a DNA molecule as it transformed from its dry

(11:58):
crystalline form, which she called the A form, to the
wet B form through an increase in relative humidity and
from this. From this observation, Franklin determined that the phosphate
groups that make up the backbone of DNA run along
the outside of the molecule, one of her first milestones
in determining the structure of DNA, because previously people had

(12:20):
thought that they were on the inside yes, and that
the bases were on the outside. So this was kind
of a major discovery for her. So in November of
nineteen fifty one, Franklin gave a talk in London about
her latest findings and American scientist James Watson was in attendance.
Watson and then graduate student Francis Crick had also been
working on figuring out DNA structure at another Medical Research

(12:42):
Council unit at Cavendish Laboratory and Cambridge, but they weren't
doing it by experimenting and collecting data. They were doing
it through deduction and model building. So when Watson heard
Franklin's talk, he didn't really take notes and he misinterpreted
her results, but still related what he'd heard incorrectly of course,
to Crick, and they used that info to slap together

(13:02):
a quick model with the sugar phosphate backbone on the inside.
So about a week after the talk, Franklin and Wilkins
visited Cambridge to check out Watson and Crick's model. As
soon as Franklin saw it, she immediately realized their mistake
and pointed out that the phosphate group should be on
the outside. And this experience probably just confirmed for Franklin
that careful and diligent experimentation was much more valuable than

(13:26):
making intuitively rash model building. So after this messo, Watson
and Crick were actually told to refrain from DNA modeling
for a while, like just take a take a focus
on proteins exactly. So Franklin continued to approach her DNA
experiments with that methodical research base manner, and they helped

(13:48):
her determine DNA's density, its unit cell size, water content,
inner phosphate distances, and other really precise kind of calculations.
And the one point she got a little bit tied
up on there was DNA's helical shape. So some scientists,
including her rival Wilkins, were convinced that DNA shape was
helical before they had any proof of it. But as

(14:11):
we kind of mentioned, that wasn't Franklin's style at all.
She needed to prove it through experimentation. She needed to
observe it. Yeah, this was tough, though partly because she
was so methodical in her research. She started out by
focusing on the diffraction image of DNA's crystalline A form,
in which it was much harder to discern that helical shape.

(14:32):
So at one point, after obtaining some data from the
A form which suggested that DNA was non helical, she
actually created this death of the helix funeral invitation in
July ninety two, and some kind of see this as
evidence that Franklin was on the wrong track and figuring
out DNA structure. Others, including Elkin in her Physics Today article,

(14:53):
note that it was a joke mainly directed at Wilkins,
and we actually, I think you ought to read a
little bit. Yeah. We we have a copy of this
funeral invitation. It's it's quite interesting. It says written by
hand to own by hand. It says, it is with
great regret that we have to announce the death on
Friday eighteenth, July fifty two of DNA helix parentheses. Crystalline

(15:16):
death followed a protracted illness which an intensive course of
injections has failed to relieve. A memorial service will be
held next Monday or Tuesday. It is hoped that Dr M. H. F.
Wilkins will speak in memory of the late Helix and
then it signed with her name. I mean, I think
this certainly proves that she had a sense of humor. Yes,

(15:36):
for sure. So. Franklin's personal notebooks, as well as information
provided by Raymond Godling, indicated that she believed the B
form to be Heli goal. But before she could get
all of her conclusions together, something truly unexpected happened. Wilkins

(15:58):
and Watson had captain touch and actually became pretty close
after that meeting where they viewed Watson and cricks incorrect model,
and in January of nineteen fifty three, Watson came to
King's College to visit with Wilkins, and Wilkins showed him
the now famous diffraction photo of the B form of
DNA that Franklin had taken in May of nineteen fifty two,

(16:20):
and that photo, which was known as Photo fifty one,
was revolutionary because it was the best photo of its
kind at the time, and Franklin took the photo looking
down on the DNA molecule, and what appeared was this
very distinct ex pattern, which was of course clear evidence
that the molecule was helical. So Franklin had apparently put

(16:43):
the photo in a drawer while she focused on the
A form, and while it was in that drawer, Wilkins
was able to access it. Some sources even suggest that
he had been making copies of all of her research
to keep her from getting ahead of him in a way,
And when he showed Watson Photo fifty one, though Watson
and Crick were the ones who instantly hold ahead in
the double helix, Watson describes his reaction to the photo.

(17:04):
He says, quote the instant I saw the picture of
my mouth fell open and my pulse began to race.
The pattern was unbelievably simpler than those obtained previously, and
Maurice told me he was now quite convinced that she,
meaning Franklin, was correct. And Watson immediately rushed back to
Cambridge to tell Krick what he'd seen. And meanwhile, Chrick
had obtained a copy of a nineteen fifty two Medical

(17:25):
Research Council report which contained a section including some of
Franklin's data. So with these two sources of information, they
were able to start creating a correct model within about
a week's time, and then in April of nineteen fifty three,
they published one of the best known scientific papers of
the century, called a Structure for deoxy ribos Nucleic Acid

(17:47):
in the journal Nature, and in it they described their
double helix DNA molecular model, with its complementary double strands
forming the sides of a twisting ladder and basses forming
the runs of that ladder, and Franklin and Gosling revised
a draft of their own to appear along with Watson
and Cricks, but partly because of the placement it received

(18:10):
in the journal, it seemed to just support Watson and
Crick's findings, even though her research was a huge, if
not the main reason why their paper existed in the
first place. Franklin only received one line of acknowledgment in
that nineteen fifty three Watson and Crick paper. In his
Noble Prize acceptance speech in nineteen sixty two, Wilkins only

(18:30):
mentioned her after thanking thirteen other colleagues by name. Watson
and Krick didn't mention her at all. So this is
where the controversy begins, and a lot of people wonder
whether Franklin would have reached the same conclusions as Watson
and Kryck did on her own eventually, and a lot
of people think that, yes, she would have. For one thing,
unpublished drafts of her paper and information in her note

(18:53):
suggests that she was close to getting the same results,
and Krick even said in nineteen seventy four that she
was only two steps away from the solution. In an
excerpt from his memoir Avoid Boring People that was published
in Technology Review a few years ago, Watson said, quote,
Rosalind Franklin would have seen the double helix first, had

(19:13):
she seen fit to enter the model building race and
been better able to interact with other scientists. He also
told Scientific American quote, We're very famous because DNA is
very famous. If Rosalind had talked to Francis starting in
nineteen fifty one, shared her data with him, she would
have solved that structure, and then she would have been
the famous one. They did give her credit here and there, though,

(19:36):
of course there was Watson's book that we mentioned the
double helix, which reveals everything. But according to a two
thousand three article in Wilson Quarterly, as soon as nineteen
fifty four, Crick had stated quote, without Franklin's data, the
formulation of our structure would have been most unlikely, if
not impossible. Some take this as evidence that Franklin must

(19:58):
have known about the fact Watson saw Photo fifty one,
but others think that, knowing her personality and how feisty
she could be, if she had known that they had
seen it without her permission, she would have been very angry. Ultimately,
Franklin's biographer Matic says there's no real evidence that she
knew what research of hers Watson and Creek had obtained,
so that part still kind of a mystery. What we

(20:19):
really know, though, is that Franklin didn't seem too troubled
about losing the race to discover the structure of DNA,
probably because she didn't consider herself in that race in
the first place. For her, it had all been about
discovering the truth. So Franklin was of course eager to
get out of King's College, considering how unhappy she was there,

(20:40):
and she did that, but the spring off three, around
the same time that the Nature article was published, she
ended up taking a position working in the crystallography laboratory
at Birkbeck College in London, and it's there that she
began to work primarily on investigating the structure of the
tobacco mosaic virus. She published seventeen papers while she was there,

(21:01):
including four in Nature, and she was much happier professionally.
I mean, I think the fact that she published seventeen
papers shows this wasn't a woman to dwell on not
getting credit for something that happened in the past. She
was looking forward definitely. And incidentally, we should mention that
when she left King's College, Randall basically told her you
cannot work on DNA anymore. So it's not like she

(21:25):
just gave it up. I mean, she might have just
given it up anyway, but she wasn't allowed to work
on it officially. In nineteen fifty six, she was diagnosed
with ovarian cancer. There was cancer in her family history,
but it also probably had a lot to do with
her work with X rays, during which she didn't ever
wear a lead apron or anything to protect herself, and
she often had to enter the radiation being for extended

(21:47):
periods to position specimens, so she just didn't realize at
the time how harmful it would be. It was and
we've talked a little bit about that before and the
Radium Girls episode exactly so ironically, during the last years
of Glinn's life, though, she became friends with Watson and Crick,
even convalescing at Krick's home once after one of her

(22:07):
cancer treatments, and according to that Wilson Quarterly article, Krick
once said that they never discussed the subject of the
race to find DNA structure. I mean, I don't know
if what you're suspicious of. I'm I'm a little suspicious
of that. I mean, I can imagine why it would
be a taboo topic between these people. You don't really
want to bring it up, perhaps especially if you're trying

(22:28):
to be friends. But exactly, but I mean, I do
I do wonder what what they really talked about, and
if she wanted to know how they got the information
or anything like them. I guess we'll never know. Franklin
died at the age of thirty seven on April sixteenth,
nineteen fifty eight, and there have been at least a
couple of biographies written about her, and a documentary done

(22:49):
on her that was aired on PBS called The Secret
of Photo fifty one, and there are also a couple
of institutions that have named buildings after her, including King's
College and Birkbeck College, And interestingly enough, Kings is called
the Franklin Wilkins Building, So she's kind of paired up
with her. Yes, So I don't know. I think a

(23:10):
good thing to point out here is that by by
talking about Franklin, we're not trying to diminish any of
the other's accomplishments. Obviously, we think Watson and crit contributed
a lot to this, and without their modeling, no how
they wouldn't have come up with DNA structure, and who
knows what would have happened. I mean, everyone here deserves
a little bit of credit. But I think that was

(23:30):
kind of the point, is that there's enough recognition to
go around. Well, in DNA is such a huge discovery,
such a huge accomplishment, there is plenty of room for
for four people. Yes, and um Watson did kind of
relent on his earlier feelings about Franklin later in his

(23:50):
epilogue to his book, he did say, quote, since my
initial impressions of her, both scientific and personal, as recorded
in the early pages of this book, and of course
referring to the double Helix, We're often wrong. I want
to say something here about her achievements, and then he
says that he and Krik both came to appreciate her
personal honesty and generosity, realizing years too late the struggles

(24:14):
that the intelligent woman faces to be accepted by a
scientific world which often regards women as mere diversions from
serious thinking. So I don't think we could put it
any better than not enough. Thank you so much for
joining us on this Saturday. If you have heard an
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(24:36):
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