Sponsored by the British Embassy * The DNA photo was so amazing that everyone forgot who took it
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Rosalind Franklin contributed a lot to the discovery of the structure of DNA, but was not recognized for it. Her story was discussed at a symposium on women in science, held at Tel Aviv University * The X-ray photograph of the DNA molecule made by Franklin. "At the sight of the picture I was left with my mouth open and my pulse began to accelerate," wrote James Watson
The structure of DNA was discovered in 1953 by researchers James Watson and Francis Crick. The two won the Nobel Prize for it nine years later. But it is doubtful whether the discovery, one of the greatest scientific achievements of the 20th century, would have been possible without the work of Rosalind Franklin. An X-ray photograph of the DNA molecule made by Franklin had a decisive contribution to the discovery of the structure of the double helix. However, despite the importance of the photograph, Franklin was not recognized for her contribution.
Only in recent years has Franklin begun to gain the recognition she deserved. Last year, as part of the celebrations for the fiftieth anniversary of the discovery of the double helix, exhibitions were held that presented her scientific work; King's College London, where she worked, named a building after her; And last year her biography was published, which received a lot of publicity.
Today, a symposium on women in science, named after Franklin, will be held at Tel Aviv University. At the symposium, organized by the British Embassy and the Council for the Advancement of Women in Science and Technology, Prof. Hermona Sorek from the Hebrew University will speak about Franklin's life and work. "Franklin produced the data on which the discovery that DNA could be made was based
Franklin. Her scientific achievements were dismissed
Two-strand chains," Sorek says, "but she was not part of the 'Old Boys' club. Even today, women in science have a harder time than men, but there is no doubt that back then it was much more serious. We are talking about a time when there were colleges that still did not accept women as students."
According to Sorek, Franklin was "one of the founders of the field known today as structural biology, which mainly deals with the structure of proteins". Franklin, born in 1921, achieved notable achievements in the field of crystallography (deciphering the structure of crystals) in the 1950s, and in XNUMX she was invited to research at King's College in London. Physicist Prof. John Burnell, who invited Franklin to King's College, claimed that "the photographs that Franklin took are among the most beautiful X-ray photographs of all time of any substance".
One evening, at the beginning of 1953, Dr. James Watson, then a young scientist at the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge, arrived at King's College. Watson came to visit Dr. Maurice Wilkins, a DNA researcher in the unit where Franklin worked. Animosity reigned between Wilkins and Franklin. Wilkins, the deputy head of the unit, thought Franklin should work under him and was surprised to find that she was working independently. According to him, she also received all the fine DNA samples.
That evening, Wilkins showed Watson an X-ray photograph of a DNA molecule, in which a distinct X shape was visible. "At the sight of the picture I was left with my mouth open and my pulse started to accelerate," wrote Watson in the book "The Double Helix", which he published in 1968. It was one of the DNA photographs made by Rosalind Franklin. At night, on the train back to Cambridge, Watson wrote down on a piece of paper all the details he remembered from the photograph.
Watson and his colleague Francis Crick "realized they were on the right track and began building a XNUMXD model of the double helix," wrote Brenda Maddox in "The Dark Lady of DNA," a biography of Franklin published last year. Watson and Crick knew that additional findings from Franklin's research were in the report she submitted to the British Medical Research Council, which funded her research. They turned to council member Max Perutz and asked him for a copy of Franklin's report. Perutz complied with their request and passed on Franklin's findings to them, again without her knowledge. At that time, Franklin left King's College and moved to another, less prestigious college.
A few months later, in April 1953, Watson and Crick published their article, which described the double helix structure of DNA, in the journal "Nature". The glory was all theirs. They cited other work by Franklin, but did not mention the X-ray photograph and other data they used.
Franklin died in 1958, aged 37, of ovarian cancer. When Watson, Crick and Wilkins won the Nobel Prize for discovering the structure of DNA four years later, Watson and Crick did not mention Franklin in their speeches at the award ceremony. Wilkins noted only her "technical skills".
In his book "The Double Helix", Watson did not refer to Franklin's scientific achievements. He called her "Rosie", wrote that she "looks like a librarian who could look beautiful if only she would take off her glasses and do something interesting with her hair", and described her as a non-collegial researcher who kept her research findings to herself. Maddox speculates that Watson depicted Franklin as a bad-tempered woman who does not act rationally to justify the use of her work without her consent.
"Franklin's photographs directly contributed to the discovery of the double helix," claims Maddox, "her research data was critical to their discovery and gave them the final push to the top." "It was very difficult to guess based on the little data they had what the DNA structure is," says Prof. Sorek. "X-ray diffraction was exactly what they were missing, and its analysis showed them exactly the missing link."
Professor Aaron Kellogg, who later won a Nobel Prize, collaborated closely with Franklin after she left King's College. Kellogg enumerates Franklin's main contributions: she "found evidence that DNA exists in two forms: as a short and wide double helix, and as a long and narrow double helix. In addition, she understood how the phosphorus atoms of the DNA molecule are arranged and took the clearest photographs of the internal structure of DNA." Kellogg examined Franklin's lab notebooks. He claims that in March 1953, a month before the publication of Watson and Crick's article in "Nature", she herself was close to deciphering the structure of DNA.
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She is buried in the Jewish cemetery in the Willesden neighborhood of London near many generations of the Rothschild family (all the famous ones), Count Samuels (the high commissioner of Palestine during the Mandatory period), the former chief rabbis of Great Britain (the Adler, Hertz and Brody families), well-known businessmen ( such as Jack Cohen, the owner of the Tesco supermarket chain and his two daughters - Shirley Porter and Irene Kreitman - are among the major funders of Tel Aviv and Ben-Gurion Universities respectively), along with many of the nobles of the community of the last century and fifty years. Every tour to the place includes a stop at her grave and a presentation of her life story - and the fact that she did not receive the credit for her discoveries and that she was not recognized in her life. . Many books can be written about those buried in this cemetery. Worth a visit for anyone interested in the history of Britain's Jewish community or the study of necrophilia. The site recently received a large grant from the British Heritage Society to preserve the site and use it for learning programs for groups of visitors, but anyone can visit on their own.