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 An overlooked letter and an unpublished news article, both written in 1953, reveal that she was an equal player.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.