Not this again. Watson didn't "steal" Franklin's data despite the myth. Raymond Gosling, a grad student co-mentored by Wilkins and Franklin, took the famous Photo 51 as part of his graduate research. Wilkins then shared the data with Watson and Crick. At worst, you can argue that Wilkins may not have consulted with Franklin before deciding to share it, but if anyone can claim to have their data "stolen" (and I don't think they really can), it would be Gosling, which unlike the others in this story, few people have heard of.

(2021)

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These replies make it clear that y'all really want to make it okay for shitty men to take credit for other people's work. You must all work on generative AI.

https://www.kcl.ac.uk/the-story-behind-photograph-51

tl;dr: Franklin's mastery of X-ray crystallography made the discovery of the structure of DNA possible; if Crick and Watson were honest, they would have made her a co-author and given her credit

> The enigmatically named “Photograph 51” (Fig.1) is an X-ray diffraction image of DNA taken by Rosalind Franklin, together with her PhD student Raymond Gosling, at King’s College London in May 1952. In fact, the camera was set up to take the photograph on Friday 2 May and it was developed on Tuesday 6 May: as Franklin reported in her lab notebook, the DNA was exposed to X-rays for a total of 62 hours to take Photograph 51.

    # ....

> Such a pattern of spots is highly suggestive of a helical structure, and so when James Watson saw Photograph 51 in January 1953, it spurred both him and Francis Crick to attempt to build a model. The photograph was shown to him by Wilkins, who had a copy because he was soon to take over the work; Franklin was shortly to leave King’s for Birkbeck College. However, Franklin was unaware that the photograph had been shown to Watson, and Wilkins had assumed that Watson had seen earlier “helix cross” diffraction patterns taken by Franklin.

> But Photograph 51 was so much clearer than any of the earlier images. Moreover, it contained further information: the vertical separation between the spots of the helix cross is one tenth of the distance from the centre of the pattern to the large, diffuse diffraction “spots” at the top and bottom of Photograph 51, which arise from the regular stacking of the bases in the middle of the double helix. From this one can conclude that there are ten stacked bases per turn of helix.

> Franklin had always resisted model building, believing that it should be possible to calculate the structure from the diffraction patterns, particularly using her A-form photographs. But this approach proved unfruitful. Unaware that Watson and Crick were building their model, Franklin returned to Photograph 51 in early 1953 and in March drafted a manuscript proposing that a “helical structure [was] highly probable”, most likely a double helix with ten bases per turn with the bases on the inside and phosphate groups on the outside.

> She even deduced from the absence of the fourth spot in each arm of the helix cross (counting outwards from the centre of the pattern, Fig.1), that the two chains would be separated by 3/8 of the pitch of the double helix, as indeed they are (Fig.2). She was so close to the answer, but only days later, Watson and Crick announced their model of the double helix.

> And thus, seventy years ago, when Franklin and Gosling’s paper appeared alongside that by Watson and Crick in Nature, her work, and in particular Photograph 51, appeared merely to confirm their model, whereas in fact it had played a crucial role in its construction.

I love hearing about Rosalind Franklin! It was an absolute shame how she got cut out of credit. Almost as bad as Noether and her teaching appointments being as assistant for men.

If you want more women in science, and who wouldn't!, then it is wise to learn the philosophy of abundance where credit is involved.