Appraising Rosalind Franklin, Science Writing and Women's Contribution to Science

Very intrigued by a host of articles on Nature dealing with Rosalind Franklin.

The Nature EDITORIAL from 25 April 2023 was How Rosalind Franklin was let down by DNA’s dysfunctional team. The story of how the structure of DNA was found is one of team science from which one member was unforgivably excluded.

The editorial reminds of the anti-semitism, the sexism, and the unhappiness that Franklin experienced during her time at King's College in London, which truncated her work at the tail of her stay. Fortunately, she was happier at Birkbeck College. It also reminds readers that the fight over who would get DNA described first, contra Linus Pauling in the US, was a serious motivator.

Then, Matthew Cobb and Nathaniel Comfort in the same issue clarify What Rosalind Franklin truly contributed to the discovery of DNA’s structure. Franklin was no victim in how the DNA double helix was solved. An overlooked letter and an unpublished news article, both written in 1953, reveal that she was an equal player.

The contribution tries to more fairly sketch the complex involvement of the King's College group's researchers and some of the allocation choices, making Franklin more than the supplier of a supposedly decisive X-ray picture.

This in turn lead me down the road of some previous Nature reporting, such as the injustice of science-historiographical reductionism from April 2020: Rosalind Franklin was so much more than the ‘wronged heroine’ of DNA. One hundred years after her birth, it’s time to reassess the legacy of a pioneering chemist and X-ray crystallographer.

The editorial rightfully points out how thinking of Franklin as the wronged party in the DNA discovery once again retracts her role as a woman scientist, under-lighting her many other science contexts and contributions.

The 2023 Editorial draws on Brenda Maddox's work, who wrote in Nature in 2003 about Rosalind Franklin, The double helix and the 'wronged heroine' who warned in the abstract already that

Franklin's premature death, combined with misogynist treatment by the male scientific establishment, cast her as a feminist icon. This myth overshadowed her intellectual strength and independence both as a scientist and as an individual.

 

LLM Papers that I have been recommended

These are papers that I have been recommended with their links. Who knows if they are as good for the Humanities as some people think?

• Edward Hu et al's LoRA: Low-Rank Adaptation of LLMs (Oct 2021).
• The so-called Chinchilla paper. (i.e. Jordan Hoffmann et al, Training Compute-Optimal Large Language Models, Mar 2022); also available at Papers with Code.
• Harm DeVries, Go Smol or go Home blog-post discussing the chinchilla paper.
• Lewis Tunstall et al (October 2023), describing the Zephyr model, a smaller LM "attuned to user intent"
• Suriya Gunisekar et al's Textbooks Are All you Need (June 2023) which describes the phi-1 system that uses higher quality tokens to train smaller models that still perform well (plus synthetic data generated by ChatGPT 3.5)
• Dohnmatob et al's Model Collapse Demystified (February 2024) that explains the problem when training sets reuse their own outputs---giving rise to some of the strategies that DeVries discusses in the README of the bigcode-dataset project.
• Nilesh Barla's blog post on how to train a custom embedding LLM model given the Zephyr model to help generate training data (April 2024).

And if all of these papers make you want to try stuff, consider RunPod ....

TEI and Multi-Language Sources

In my ongoing efforts to familiarize myself with TEI and its tools for modeling sources for the Humanities properly, I stumbled upon this discussion by Van Hulle on how to deal with Samuel Beckett's bi-lingualism, as Beckett translates from English to French and back again, authoring in both languages even.

The text at hand is Stirrings Still and Soubresauts, and though it has hardly six pages, Beckett seemed to oscillate between writing it in English or in French. The resulting publication history is complicated too, with an expensive hard-cover edition supposedly preceding the newspaper edition, when in fact it did not.

Again

Spending a lot of time today thinking about repetition (Difference und Wiederholung, in the words of Deleuze) as problems of knowledge representation. The impetus came from a book on Caterina of Medici (Leah Redmond Chang's Young Queens), which in turns uses the Chronicle of Le Murate to tell the story of eleven-year old Caterina getting caught up in the battle between Medici-Pope Clement VII and the Florentine Republic.

As so often, Sister Giustina Niccolini was writing many years past the events, in 1598, about a situation that happened in the summer of 1530. The rough of it was that the Republican council of Florence wanted to use Caterina as a pain point in their negotiations against the Pope, and the nuns of Le Murate, who were sheltering Caterina, wanted to prevent that, fearing that she might get hurt.

So we have all the usual elements, we have goals and plans and scripts. The interesting part is the conflicts, which interrupt these scripts (or just attempt to do so). 

Silvestro Aldobrandini, the secretary of the council, goes with his soldiers to pick up Caterina from Le Murate in the Via Ghibellina. At this points, plans made by the council and plans made by the pope and his Spanish supporters have been made and thwarted. 

Though the council had placed Caterina there as a guest in 1527 to hold her hostage, they now needed her back for a new plan--to pressure the pope into withdrawing his troops. The nuns refuse to hand her over by refusing to open the door. 

Aldobrandini returned later that night to blast the door to splinters (with canons?), thereby foiling the nuns' plan of keeping Caterina safe in the nunnery. So the nuns physically block Aldobrandini and his men.

Trying to block the men from penetrating deeper into the convent, the nuns sank to their knees, then threw themselves to the ground, crying, praying, pleading, and arguing. 

--Chang, Leah Redmond. Young Queens: Three Renaissance Women and the Price of Power (p. xii). Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Kindle Edition. 

As a quick aside---notice the nightmare of representing this scene, given the plurality of behaviours and the unclear activities (what did they pray? what did they argue), not to mention the loose quantification.

Aldobrandini continues to pursue his goal of pressuring the pope by replanning, but with the nuns bypassed,  Caterina becomes his next obstacle, neither going willingly or shutting up. 

It is silly to assume that Caterina had no patterns for the scenes that she was making, first arguing to remain at the covenant, and then demanding of the world why she was being submitted to such a violent death (Chang, p. xix). So there are scripts here that elude us and that are prolongued. 

Persuading someone is a complex process that may require multiple iterations, some repetition, some novel points, and definitely a good chunk of passage of time. All of this was happening while Aldobrandini was trying to get her on horseback to someplace where she could be used in her role as pressure point. (Chang makes no mention of how that was supposed to work, perhaps her sources did not know either.)

Chang suggests that Aldobrandini must have been swayed, but it is not clear that this is true. Aldobrandini needed Caterina alive, and after chasing the pope's soldiers away, Caterina would most likely return to the covenant, where she had spent the previous three years as hostage. I personally see no giving in when Aldobrandini tells her that she will not come to harm (a dead hostage is a useless hostage) and that he will return her to the covenant within a month's time (her preferred "storage place", as far as the Republican council of Florence was concerned).

Aldobrandini told Caterina that no harm would come to her. He promised to return her to Le Murate within the month. (Chang,  p. xix)

At this point, the whole thing turns into a morality tale of sorts. The Medici restoration leads to the execution of counselors and the torture of those that are banished (Chang, p. xix), but Caterina (somehow) manages to intercede for Aldobrandini and get his death sentence commuted to banishment (with or without torture, Chang does not tell us). 

This then leads us to some of the meta-historical aspects of this story that Hayden White would have immediately jumped on. Clearly the Le Murate chronicle is not a neutral source. Sister Niccolini emphasizes the connection to the French Queen Caterina to the Medici-funded nunnery (Chang, p. 14), proudly recounts the gifts (Chang, p. xix) received, and the ongoing relationship. In fact, Caterina would petition them to pray for her continuously in 1573 and again in 1583 (Chang, p. 17), as we know from her letters (it is unclear whether Niccolini mentions that as well). By the time Niccolini completed her chronicle, the French Queen had been dead for almost a decade (1589).

With that narrative setup, we immediately have heroes and villains, and the morality tale acquires a structure of perhaps a tragedy for Aldobrandini, or the council? Or perhaps even a comedy from Caterina's point of view? More textual analysis would be necessary to make either of that attribution stick. The nuns clearly wanted to be seen as powerful intercessors, either in their arguing or in their praying. 

We therefore need representations that capture these emplotment aspects, the role attributions. Perhaps one might argue that our question of which nun did what is highly misguided. The nuns (and perhaps even the soldiers) function more like the chorus in a Greek theatrical tradition, they as a group embody a sentiment that the author wishes to express.