James Watson has died
30 comments
·November 7, 2025dsr_
Jun8
This is an ignorant take on what really happened. There are many sources online to better understand what happened, you might want to start with the Nature article: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-01313-5
If you want to attack Watson, his comments on race later in life is a better angle.
dsr_
That's a quote from the NYT obituary.
dekhn
It's also incomplete and incorrect. It was Gosling's photo, he did the work for Franklin. And she had already shared the results in a department seminar before Wilkins showed it to W&C. And she was credited for this in the W&C paper in Nature.
echelon
Your summary of it is what's wrong:
> Codiscoverer of Rosalind Franklin's notebooks.
Watson and Crick were already working on a double helix model. The crystallographic data helped them fit the puzzle pieces and confirm the model. You're discounting all of the work they put into it.
Having a diffraction picture of DNA helps, but you still have to put all of the residues in the correct places, understand the 5' to 3' alignment, work out how replication might work...
You're making them out to be thieves.
If you were working on a theoretical model of an unknown molecule using primitive tools and somebody had data that could confirm your ideas and fix the kinks, wouldn't you want to see it so you could finish your work?
That Franklin died before she could win a Nobel Prize is tragic, but she wasn't the lone discoverer of DNA.
throwawaymaths
FWIW watson was incredibly racist against scots-irish americans, repeatedly calling them dumb in his lectures. that doesn't necessarily excuse his casual racism, but i would assume he meant to imply that people can overcome their genetic ingroups' statistical predilections
echelon
That's reframing things too much.
There's the experimental data, and then there's the theoretical model.
Watson and Crick were already working on a theoretical double helix model prior to discovering Franklin's x-ray crystallography data, but at the time their model was wrong.
Franklin produced the x-ray crystallographic data that completed the picture and produced the correct working model. Franklin could have also figured out the double helix model herself using her own data and extensive crystallography background, but Watson and Crick were laser focused on only this one problem and beat her to it.
Franklin was robbed of the recognition she deserved, and Watson and Crick should have co-credited her at minimum. But it's incorrect to say that Watson and Crick weren't about to figure it out themselves.
Franklin tragically died of cancer a few years after the discovery and was ineligible to receive a posthumous Nobel Prize. She was only 37.
dekhn
She was credited, see the original W&C paper: https://www.nature.com/articles/171737a0 at the end is an acknowledgement. She also has a related article in the same issue of Nature.
I wouldn't be so sure that Franklin would have figured out that DNA was an antiparallel double helix. She knew it was a helix from the fibre diffraction pattern, but I don't think just anybody would have had the insight W&C did about it being a double helix and antiparallel, which immediately suggests a possible copying mechanism for the genetic material. However, we can't know for sure.
_dain_
>Codiscoverer of Rosalind Franklin's notebooks.
this is a preposterously reductive and dishonest account of what happened.
NedF
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AlgorithmicTime
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boxerab
Yes, how she was treated by Crick and Watson was scandalous.
ricardo81
That's what I read on the surface. Any useful links for the context?
dekhn
The best I've read is "The Eighth Day Of Creation" (which is amazing book beyond the part that covers the elucidation of the structure of DNA). He references multiple internal data sources that establish the process by which Gosling's photo made it to Watson and Crick. Of all the accounts I've read, it seems to be the most factual. I think it's also worth reading Watson's account ("The Double Helix") and the book that originally brought the most attention to the treatment of Franklin ("Rosalind Franklin: The Dark Lady of DNA")
I believe this article has some updated results: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/25/science/rosalind-franklin... and it appears there was an earlier book before Dark Lady, referenced here: https://www.nytimes.com/1975/09/21/archives/rosalind-frankli...
runnr_az
97 years old... must've had good genes...
null
mellosouls
Plenty of non-paywall links that would be better here eg
nerf0
What's with the "is dead at"? I'm not a native speaker but it seems a bit disrespectful.
observationist
It's a way of communicating his age; it's standard phrasing for American english. No disrespect is implied or intended. There are generally no holds barred when it comes to dunking on people that are truly disliked, and when newspapers want to disrespect someone, they will leave no room for doubt (there are some awfully hilarious examples of such obituaries throughout American history.)
"Abraham Lincoln, president of the United States, dead at 56"
It's meant for headline brevity, replacing things like "has died at age 97" and is standard practice.
muskyFelon
Its not always included. I think they added it to highlight how old he was.97 years is quite the accomplishment, so I don't interpret it as disrespectful.
carabiner
This is normal english.
echelon
This is native English and quite colloquial. It's been used in widespread use in newspapers and in the media since forever.
From just recently:
> James Watson, Co-Discoverer of the Structure of DNA, Is Dead at 97
> ‘90s rapper dead at 51: ‘He went out in style’
> Anthony Jackson, Master of the Electric Bass, Is Dead at 73
> Chen Ning Yang, Nobel-Winning Physicist, Is Dead at 103
> Ace Frehley, a Founding Member of Kiss, Is Dead at 74
> Ruth A. Lawrence, Doctor Who Championed Breastfeeding, Is Dead at 101
> Soo Catwoman, ‘the Female Face of Punk,’ Is Dead at 70
More famous headlines:
> Jimmy Carter, Peacemaking President Amid Crises, Is Dead at 100 [1]
> Nancy Reagan, Former First Lady, Is Dead At Age 94 [2]
> Dick Cheney Is Dead at 84 [3]
> Ozzy Osbourne Is Dead At 76 Years Old, Just Weeks After The Final Black Sabbath Concert [4]
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/29/us/politics/jimmy-carter-...
[2] https://www.scrippsnews.com/obituaries/nancy-reagan-former-f...
TheRealNGenius
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timonoko
[flagged]
Uptrenda
I'm well aware of Watson's views that got him cancelled.
I know that Grok is meant to be the "uncensored, unbiased" version of LLMs. But the training data still reflects human bias, and there is definitely some irony in using an LLM for "objectivity." I do wonder what HN thinks about this though. Whether you can prompt an LLM to reflect more balanced takes that humans could do in controversial topics (assuming the LLM is "rooted" without a biased system prompt.)
agumonkey
is grokipedia allowed ??
metalliqaz
What is this abomination?
"Fact-checked by Grok"
So... it's a rip-off of Wikipedia edited by an LLM that was specifically designed for misinformation by the world's richest troll?
Do I have that right? Cancer.
Codiscoverer of Rosalind Franklin's notebooks.
"The key came when Dr. Wilkins gave them access to certain images of Dr. Franklin’s, one of which, Photo 51, turned out to be the clue to the molecule’s structure. In what is widely — but not universally — regarded as a breach of research protocol, Dr. Wilkins provided the X-ray image to Dr. Watson and Mr. Crick without Dr. Franklin’s knowledge."