Reddit reviews Rosalind Franklin: The Dark Lady of DNA

No. I don't think they stole it but I don't think the story is entirely fair to Franklin either. Watson/Crick were collaborators with Franklin, but she was often very unfairly treated by both Watson and her supervisor, Maurice Wilkins, who also won the Nobel Prize (which should have been hers if she was alive) with Watson and Crick. They mention in their paper on the DNA helix, which was published back to back with Franklin, that they saw her data, but it gets a little confusing, because they write:

> " We have also been stimulated by a knowledge of the general nature of the unpublished experimental results and ideas of Dr. M. H. F Wilkins, Dr. R. E. Franklin and their coworkers"

but they earlier state

>" We were not aware of the details of the results presented there when we devised our structure, which rests mainly though not entirely on published experimental data and stereochemical arguments"

This is the part that people have been debating since then, and isn't entirely above board and true. They were aware of this because one of the other members of the MRC, Max Perutz, was an advisor to the group where Franklin was and received advance, confidential information about Franklin's data. He shared it with Watson and Crick and they then used it to piece together their model. But I don't think it was theft for a number of reasons, though your interpretation may be different.

1. There was extensive sharing of ideas and cross-talk between the Cambridge and King's College groups. Rosalind in fact steered Watson and Crick away from an incorrect triple helix which Pauling eventually published.
   
   
2. They ultimately published back to back in the same issue of Nature. Wilkins published Franklin's photo in the same issue with her knowledge, and Wilkins was in constant communication with the Cambridge groups and with Franklin. She fully received credit for her work.
   
   3). She acknowledges the help of the Crick in her paper published in the same issue that shows the data.
   
   4). Franklin herself likely didn't consider it theft and was a close friend of Crick (she didn't like Watson, for good reason) until her death. When she was dying of cancer, she lived with Crick and his wife, so I'm not sure that she would do this if she felt she had her work stolen.
   
   So, its difficult to sort out but I don't think that it was "theft" because there was open communication of most ideas between the two groups and the discovery of the helix was a group endeavor probably not possible alone. Franklin alone would have likely never gotten the structure, since she was a hardcore physics type person who wanted to determine everything directly from the data while Watson and Crick just used models and compared them to the data until they found one that fit. If you break it down, Franklin was an extremely talented crystallographer, Watson had the chemical knowledge of how the bases could pair, and Crick was the theoretical person that could translate between the two. Wilkins made some contributions, but I don't personally think they were as substantial.
   
   Sources: -Rosalind Franklin: The Dark Lady of DNA
   
   What Mad Pursuit: A personal view of scientific discovery
   
   I Wish I'd Made You Angry Earlier: Essays on Science, Scientists, and Humanity
   
   Present at the Flood: How Structural Molecular Biology Came About
   
   

Because she was a woman, she wasn't even allowed to get a bachelor's degree from the college where she studied.

>Franklin was born on July 25, 1920 in London. She exhibited a love of science from an early age and enrolled at Newnham College in 1938 to study chemistry. After she graduated with the equivalent of a bachelor’s degree (Cambridge did not award degrees to women until 1948), Franklin worked as an assistant researcher at the British Coal Utilization Research Association. In 1946, she moved to Paris to work at the State Central Chemical Laboratory Services. There, Franklin learned how to do x-ray diffraction from crystallographer Jacques Mering. X-ray diffraction allows researchers to determine the structure of a molecule, and is the technique Franklin would later use to take Photo 51 of DNA.
>
>Five years later, Franklin began working at the biophysics unit at King’s College in London. It was here that the scientist took the first-known picture of deoxyribonucleic acid, or DNA. However, Franklin did not receive credit for her discovery. In Jan. 1953, acting on his dislike of Franklin, Maurice Wilkins, a fellow researcher at King’s College, gave her picture of DNA to her competitors – Watson and Crick. And with that, Mr. Wilkins altered the DNA-discovery narrative.
>
>In March 1953, Watson and Crick published their double-helix model of DNA, and a month later gave a nod of acknowledgement to Franklin’s work in a footnote.
>
>Franklin did nothing to protest this inadequate acknowledgement of her work, says Franklin’s biographer Brenda Maddox in a 2002 interview with NPR. Over 40 years after seeing Franklin’s Photo 51, Watson publicly acknowledged that seeing it was the “key event” in understanding DNA, Maddox writes in her book, “The Dark Lady of DNA.”

Source: Google Doodle: How Rosalind Franklin photographed DNA

If you like science this lady is the mother of DNA, well she had a huge part in it and got snubbed of her Nobel prize due to an untimely death.

Rosalind Franklin: The Dark Lady of DNA https://www.amazon.com/dp/0060985089/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_awd_YviCwbSJ2WD92