Crick and Watson Did Not Steal Franklin's Data
7 comments
·December 11, 2025coredog64
It's not in this article, but I have a vague recollection from other discussions that the actual x-ray diffraction image was taken by one of Franklin's graduate students.
xhkkffbf
I believe that Rosalind Franklin didn't take the photo in question. My understanding is that it was done by her grad student, Raymond Gosling.
Certainly if we're arguing about giving credit where it's due, we should mention his name. Perhaps even put it in the headline?
renewiltord
When there is an effort to “elevate people of type X” you have to suspect that some large number of those “elevations” are fraudulent rewriting of history. I immediately ignore the whole lot.
Peek just a little bit behind the curtain and it always turns out the controversy is fake.
Pretty much the normal version of history has been accurate for a while.
fragrom
I'm of two minds on this. On the one hand, you're right--I've seen lots of social media memes that basically say stuff like, "Einstein was an idiot, it was his wife that did all the work!" when that's patently a false statement.
But I also know that a lot of that sort of thing DID happen. Women, marginalized groups, etc., were written out of history on a regular basis.
The problem is, the issue requires nuance and intellectually honest discussion. And that doesn't exist when you're trying to create the next biggest clickbait article or meme.
silisili
Agreed.
I'm not sure at what point it must have way overcorrected. Most if not every single thing I was taught in school that a lot members of this group did/invented turned out to be an exaggeration or outright lie, I came to find out later.
Which is a shame, because most of their stories are interesting in their own right to have been properly explained. Now, instead of lifting anyone up, we're doing some weird dance of fighting back and forth about who is lying(and usually, the answer is both sides).
everdrive
I'm very happy that this view is getting some broader attention. In the abstract, it's no different than it's always been: history is written by the victors. The particulars are going to be era-specific, as you've noted. _Any_ ideology is going to have its blind spots and its convenient lies.
"In a full description of the structure in a paper submitted in August 1953 and published in 1954, Crick and Watson did attempt to set the record straight17. They acknowledged that, without Franklin’s data, “the formulation of our structure would have been most unlikely, if not impossible”, and implicitly referred to the MRC report as a “preliminary report” in which Franklin and Wilkins had “independently suggested that the basic structure of the paracrystalline [B] form is helical and contains two intertwined chains”."
What Rosalind Franklin truly contributed to the discovery of DNA’s structure - https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-01313-5