Rosalind Franklin: DNA's Dark Lady

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 (00:00):
Welcome to Stuff you missed in history class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm to Blane a chalk reboarding and I'm scared out.
And even if you're not a science person at all,
you probably know something about d N A. That's stuff

(00:21):
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 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,
not to rule out our younger listeners. And we can

(00:43):
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 already knew well. The people
credited in most high school in middle school textbooks, at
least when I was in school, which admittedly was a

(01:04):
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 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

(01:25):
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 DNA discovery has caused quite a
bit of controversy in the science world for a number

(01:48):
of reasons. So number one, it's without question that her
research played a really big role in helping suff out
DNA structure. But because she died four years before Watson,
Crick and wilk And even received the Nobel Prize, the
prize only honors living scientists. So she said for this year,
except for the year, except for this year, there was

(02:08):
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 then. So yeah, they
are more associated with it because they won the award

(02:31):
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 accomplishment. That's the
second reason, and then the third is in his nineteen
sixty eight but chronicling the discovery called the double helix

(02:53):
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. For instance, did Watson and Crick steal

(03:14):
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 relevant question here. Who was Rosalind Franklin

(03:35):
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 for science from the very start. She was

(03:56):
born Rosalind Elsie Franklin in London, England, on July twenty
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 progressive and really encouraged their daughter academically. They

(04:19):
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, even though her parents wanted her to pursue
social work instead. So she enrolled Newnham College at the

(04:42):
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 noted her scientific achievements or her initial ones,
to give a little disclaimer and say that we are

(05:03):
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 involved and the story involved,
because story sometimes if you get too bogged down in
the other details, you miss out on some of them.
Y'all can easily find out scientific details on this, So

(05:24):
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 World War Two and the fact that Franklin found
Nourish kind of difficult to work with changed her course

(05:45):
of study a little bit. According to Encyclopedia Britannica, she
served as an air raid warden in London and also
left her job with Nourish in nineteen forty two to
do war related work as a researcher with the British
Utilization Research Association. That's kind of a mouthful in southern England,
and while she was there she worked on studying the

(06:08):
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 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 She also

(06:29):
authored five coal related papers they're still sited 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. In

(06:52):
nineteen seven, 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

(07:14):
blasting 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

(07:35):
closer level. 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. So not just
carbon in a static state, but transforming. So Franklin was
doing good work in Paris, and by most accounts, the
three years or so that she was there were the

(07:56):
happiest ones of her life. According to that Physics Today
article by elk And, 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 her life that we're going to
talk about, the one in which DNA takes center stage.

(08:20):
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 chance to work on one of the
major scientific challenges of the moment, figuring out the structure

(08:40):
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 to have her around. They didn't work
well together there and ended up disliking each other the

(09:02):
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 that she was working for him. Another point

(09:22):
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 boss exactly, so they both had conflicting ideas of
who is boss. And she also had more experience with
X ray diffraction techniques of course, I mean that was
why she was brought in in the first place, and

(09:43):
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 with him, he would really just shut down and

(10:04):
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 king saying that women weren't even

(10:25):
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 luntioned a lot the whole
lunch thing, 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

(10:48):
female 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,

(11:10):
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

(11:32):
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

(11:55):
thought that they were on the inside, yes, and at
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

(12:16):
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 relayed what he'd heard incorrectly of course,
to Crick, and they used that info to slap together

(12:36):
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

(13:00):
making intuitively rash model building. So after this method, Watson
and Crick were actually told to refrain from DNA modeling
for a while, like just take take a focus on
proteins exactly. So Franklin continued to approach her DNA experiments
with that methodical, research based manner, and they helped her

(13:23):
determine DNA's density, its unit cell size, water content in
her phosphate distances, and other really precise kind of calculations.
And the one point she got a little bit tied
up on THEO was DNA's helical shape. So some scientists,
including her rival Wilkins, were convinced that DNA's shape was
helical before they had any proof of it. But as

(13:45):
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.

(14:07):
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 ninetift 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,

(14:28):
note that it was a joke mainly directed at Wilkins.
And we actually, I think, yeah, we we have a
copy of this funeral invitation. It's it's quite interesting. It says,
written by hand, written by hand. It says, it is
with great regret that we have to announce the death
on Friday, eighteenth July nineteen fifty two of DNA helix parentheses.

(14:49):
Crystalline 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

(15:09):
a sense of humor, yes, for sure. So Franklin's personal notebooks,
as well as information provided by Raymond Gosling, indicated that
she believed the B form to be heliical. But before
she could get all of her conclusions together, something truly
unexpected happened. Wilkins and Watson had kept in touch and

(15:30):
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, and that photo, which was

(15:52):
known as photo fifty one, was revolutionary because it was
the best photo of its kind at the time. And
Franklin took a 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 the photo in a drawer

(16:13):
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 Krick were the
ones who instantly pulled ahead and the double helix. Watson
describes his reaction to the photo. He says, quote the

(16:35):
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 Research Council report which

(16:57):
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, in the journal Nature,

(17:18):
and in it they described their double helix DNA molecular
model with its complementary double strands forming the sides of
a twisting ladder and bassis 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 in the journal. It seemed

(17:41):
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 Nobel Prize acceptance speech in
nineteen sixty two, Wilkins only mentioned her after thanking thirteen

(18:02):
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 encrypt 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 suggests that she was close to getting

(18:24):
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
she seen fit to enter the model building race and

(18:45):
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,
of course there was Watson's book that we mentioned the

(19:08):
double helix, which reveals everything. But according to a two
thousand three article in Wilson Quarterly, as soon as nineteen 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 have known

(19:28):
about the fact that 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 Crick had obtained,
so that parts still kind of a mystery. What we

(19:49):
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 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,

(20:09):
and she did that. But the spring of eighteen fifty 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

(20:31):
was there, 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

(20:54):
she just gave it up. I mean, she might have
just given it up anyway, but she wasn't allowed to
work on Addicially, in ninety 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

(21:14):
often had to enter the radiation being for extended periods
to position specimens. So she just didn't realize at the
time how harmful it would be. Then we've talked a
little bit about that before on the Radium Girls episode
exactly so ironically, during the last years of Franklin's life, though,
she became friends with Watson and Crick, even convalescing at

(21:35):
Crick's home once after one of her cancer treatments, and
according to that Wilson Quarterly article. Qrick once said that
they never discussed the subject of the race to find
DNA structure. I mean, I don't know if 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,

(21:57):
perhaps especially if you're trying to be friends. But fact Lee,
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. And
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 on her that was

(22:19):
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, King's is called the Franklin Wilkins Building.
So she's kind of paired up with her, yes, So
I don't know. I think a good thing to point

(22:40):
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 kind of the point is that

(23:01):
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 epilogue to his book, he did say, quote,

(23:23):
since my initial impressions of her, both scientific and personal,
as recorded in the early pages of this book, and
of course we're 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 Kirk both came to
appreciate her personal honesty and generosity, realizing years too late
the struggles that the intelligent woman faces to be accepted

(23:46):
by a scientific world which often regards women as near
diversions from serious thinking, so I don't think we could
put it any better than that. Not enough do we
have some listener mail. We do, so this message is
from Maggie and she wrote, Dear Sara Deblina. First of all,
let me tell you how much I love your podcast.

(24:07):
Since my husband left for Iraq earlier this year, you
have helped fill a quiet house with lots of fun,
interesting stories. So thanks for doing your part. From military family,
or at least this military family member, so that was
a really nice thing to say. Thank you, Maddie. Um,
she says, thankfully, come home next month, and since this
email came in November, should be home by now. Um.

(24:28):
She also wrote that she wanted to suggest some military
spouses as potential topics, and she said we are pretty
interesting bunch, if I do say so myself. Lady Custer
in particular prided herself on being quote the only officer's
wife who always followed the regiment and wrote a lot
about her experiences, including a book called Boots and Saddles.

(24:51):
I would love to hear what other military spouses from
different eras and parts of the world you come up with,
so thank you for that suggestion. Maggie, have we talked
about any military wives in the Civil War series yet?
I don't think we have. Um, I'm trying to remember
if any of the nurses were military wives, and many
of them were unmarried, so I don't think that's the case.

(25:12):
So it's definitely a topic that we could look into
some more. Yeah, so thank you for suggesting that one, Maggie,
And I hope you guys like this sort of scientific
kick we've been on lately. Yeah, we tend to get
obsessed with subjects for a little while. By medicine, I mean,
maybe it is the Civil War medicine ones that have
gotten us kind of off on a science tantary areas

(25:36):
of science, and I think the Halloween type episodes on
alchemy and so forth also kind of inspired me in
that direction very much. And just for those of you
who don't know, we do have a whole science themed
podcast here at How Stuff Works called Stuff to Blow
Your Mind, which they go into some more like nitty
gritty science stuff, So that might, um, that might be

(25:57):
great for for those of you who love these science
gamed episodes. That's very true. And if any of you
guys have any more episode suggestions, whether science or otherwise.
Please write us where History podcast at how staff works
dot com or we're on Facebook and we're also on
Twitter at Myston History. And I'm sure we have articles

(26:17):
on on DNA and we have how DNA works. In fact,
if you want to find out a little bit more
of the technical side of what we talked about, that's
the homepage editor in Dublina coming through. It knows exactly
what articles are on the right, so you can go
check that one out. It's called how DNA Works and
you can find it by searching on our homepage at
www dot how stuff works dot com. Be sure to

(26:43):
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