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 An overlooked letter and an unpublished news article, both written in 1953, reveal that she was an equal player.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

 

Atomic Bomb Markers in your Body

 (Part of the Great Tab Cleanup)

A BBC report on how bodily radioactivity documents the anthropocene.

Tudor Fertility and Expenses

 (Part of the Great Tab Cleanup)

• How Blood problems affected Henry VIII's plans
• Privy Purse accounts of Elizabeth of York, which show Elizabeth Denton on p.99 as recipient of money (arguably the woman who taught the bedroom arts to Henry VIII). [Formally, Nicholas H. Nicholas (eds) (1830), Privy Purse Expenses of Elizabeth of York: Wardrobe Accounts of Edward IV, London (William Pickering)]

The suggestion comes from Philippa Jones (2016), The Other Tudors, p.28; p.52 (Kindle Edition), citing , p.99 in Nicholas' 1830 edition.

Objective as time-independent

In her article on the then-latest breast cancer screening research, 538-science writer Christie Aschwanden noted

Welch’s group has published other studies with similar results. One of those categorized cancers according to stage, rather than size, however, and some critics countered that the way that cancers are categorized has evolved, which could make comparisons difficult. So in this latest study, the researchers looked at size — a measure that is objective and hasn’t changed over time — and came to the same conclusion: Mammography produces an increase in the number of women diagnosed and treated for breast cancer and a non-invasive cancer called ductal carcinoma in situ (DCIS), but it doesn’t do much to prevent the deadliest cases.

The main point I wish to draw attention to is the distinction between evolving categories, such as cancer stages, and the measurement of size. Though her precise wording, namely that size is an objective measure, is contestable, Aschwanden's phrasing suggests that the crucial difference is the one between evolving and categories that remain constant for a duration of research.

Now granted, this is not what people mean when they use the word "objective", but perhaps it is a better meaning for the word than the current one, which seems to imply some socially indisputable common ground.

O'Boyle et al on the Chrysalis Effect

A fascinating study of questionable research practices that requires access to SAGE publications to read, however.

Richard Klein's Many Labs replication effort

Richard Klein and many many collaborators performed a multi-lab replication study of some thirteen key social psychology claims.

Chris Chambers on the First Anniversary of Registered Reports'

One year after the introduction of Registered Reports at Cortex magazine (Elsevier) in May of 2013, Chris Chambers summarizes the lessons learned.

Chambers gives not only a useful process chart for the new strategy, but also pokes fun at the hypothetico-deductive method by inserting the cheats that the false incentive structure produces.

Chambers successfully reused that chart in his APS 2014 presentation.

Curiouser and Curiouser

When a friend of mine interviewed a pagan who wanted to know more about easter eggs, easter bunnies and easter foxes, this lead me to Georg Franck von Franckenau, a medical doctor and personal attendant to Christian V of Denmark, who wrote some 20+ Medical dissertations in the style of Latin Satires, published posthumously by his son in 1722, where Satire #19 is the first discussion of the easter egg and the easter bunny, with Latin and German quotes (p.396 in the book, p.413 in the PDF). The work of Franckenau, especially his analysis of the sexual and the erotic in these dissertations, is discussed in this paper, which places Franckenau squarely into the Baroque tradition of curiosity literature (p.88 Fn 14). The author makes a good case for the relationship between the extreme and marvelous and the Baconian inductive method on the other, which required these outliers to adjust the conceptual framework (p.96 Fn 55).

Among books that discuss the curiosity literature is Christoph Daxelmüller (1979), Barockdissertationen und Polyhistorismus. Die Curiositas der Ethnica und Magica im 17. und 18. Jahrhundert. Würzburg, 117–186, which is available at the Vienna FB for European Ethnography.

Revisiting Thomas Kuhn

In the context of seeing that Kuhn had discussed the disciplinary matrix in the Postscript of 1969 to his The Structure of Scientific Revolution, I revisited that postscript and was struck by the degree to which Kuhn was Kantian in his outlook with his distinction of stimuli versus perception.

Imagine my non-surprise when in the Neusis interview, Kuhn admits that Kant was among the first four philosophers he learned about at Harvard.