Not everyone even believed that DNA was the genetic material and more than a scaffold. 

Merely figuring out that is was a duplex was not very important – the crucial  insight was that the strands are antiparallel and complementary, which makes the extremely mysterious replication mechanism obvious.   THAT was the real question – if DNA was important, how could so much of it replicate during the time of a cell cycle, and how could it contain enough complexity to make “genes?”

That is why they got the Nobel Prize for a ONE PAGE paper that ended on a wry observation about the implications for DNA replication and left the rest to the reader’s imagination.

To revise the text would be a complete nonsense – however wrong-headed he may then have been, forcing him into some kind of sanitised recantation now would be deeply silly, and a bad betrayal of the real history, which does include his wrong-headedness.  Annotation is by far the best solution, not least because it shows up so many other kinds of wrong-headedness, in so many other people. 

Given all the fuss people have made about Crick and Watson’s treatment of Franklin over the years as recounted in TDH I often wonder if anyone actually read the epilogue!

Rosalind Franklin has become such a symbolic figure that it is now hard to separate facts from myths. However, in the rush to see Franklin as wronged, it needs to be recalled that Wilkins was a senior independent scientist, had laid a lot of groundwork for the DNA work, and had obtained the actual DNA samples Franklin went on to take x-ray pictures of. All this was then essentially taken off him by the unit head (Randall) and given to Franklin. So it could be argued with a good deal of justification that the DNA project at King’s was very much Wilkins’ baby, and would not have existed for Franklin to take forward without years of Wilkins’ groundwork. 

As my dad has often expressed, the general view in structural biology later on was that the DNA structure had four ‘parents’ – Crick, Watson, Franklin and WIlkins (although some people would also argue for adding Erwin Chargaff, whose base ratios A=T and G=C provided a vital clue). Of the four, the general view was that the Cambridge duo deserved the most credit, as they were the ones who correctly deduced the structure. Franklin did not get the credit she deserved at the time, and was dead by the time the Nobel was awarded. But the kind of received popular view that Wilkins was a usurper of credit due to Franklin seems to me to be a distortion, and at odds with the recollections of those who were there.

I discuss some of this in a blogpost over here, written a few years ago and triggered by reports of the discovery of some of Crick and Wilkins’ old correspondence, which I guess is featured in the new edition of The Double Helix.

Austin Elliott

FYI — All of the Watson and Crick papers (owned by Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory and Wellcome Trust, respectively) are being digitized as we speak, and will be made available online next year. 

However, Franklin did not actually do x-ray crystallography of DNA.  Unlike globular proteins or t-RNA, polymeric nucleic acids cannot be induced to form single crystals suitable for x-ray analysis.  Instead, at that time they were limited to analyzing the x-ray diffraction patterns from nucleic acid fibers.  The samples were prepared by drawing fibers from highly concentrated, viscous gels prepared by alcohol precipitation of the DNA from aqueous solution. In the resulting fibers, the DNA molecules line up in parallel in quasi-crystalline arrays. From the patterns of x-rays diffracted by these fibers, the primary structural motif of DNA was discerned.

The modern ability to chemically synthesize short DNA molecules (oligodeoxyribonucleotides) of high purity has made x-ray crystallography of DNA possible.  In this case, the structures DNA and many DNA-protein and DNA-drug complexes can be determined at atomic resolution.

For anyone interested…

Watson is such a lost opportunity for the US to have a real national “science dean.” He’s entertaining enough that he could have been a wonderful public ambassador for molecular biology, except his personality is so deeply flawed as not to allow it.

I read Brenda Maddox’s 2003 book and came away with the distinct impression that the few moments that the scientists had had access to that X-ray photograph of Franklin’s were not just instrumental but formative to the work that Watson and Crick undertook in the hours, days and weeks after. 

Yes, I could be wrong, but I don’t think that I am. There is nothing to suggest that Franklin, had she returned to the laboratory and continued her work, wouldn’t herself have eventually realized the importance of that X-ray photograph. She was scooped, and not in a very generous light, either.

Also, this play is part of LATW’s Relativity Series, which are plays about science, math and society, and there are some real gems in there (including Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia):  http://latw.nfshost.com/wp2/