You know, usually when we look at a photograph
that changed the world, there's this expectation
of clarity. Right. Yeah. Like it should be obvious.
Exactly. Like a portrait of a historical figure
or a snapshot of the moon landing. You look at
the image and there it is. The subject is undeniable.
It's obvious to anyone who's seen it. Oh, because
the visual is supposed to tell the whole story
instantly. Well, it's supposed to be an objective,
recognizable record of a moment in time. But
then you step into the world of molecular biology,
and suddenly that comforting clarity is just
gone. Oh, completely gone. Yeah. If you look
at one of the most famous consequential images
in the entire history of science, it honestly
just looks like a a murky gray smudge on a dirty
camera lens. It really does. Maybe if you squint,
it's like a blurry letter X inside a faint dark
circle. Right, and to the untrained eye, it is
the absolute definition of diagnostic muddy waters.
I mean, it literally looks like a mistake. But
to someone who actually knows how to read the
mathematics hidden inside those shadows, that
blurry X is the literal blueprint of life itself.
And that image is the legendary photo 51. The
x -ray diffraction image that definitively proved
DNA is a double helix. A big one. The big one.
And chances are, you already know the names associated
with decoding that famous shape. You know James
Watson. You know Francis Crick. Right. But today
we are taking a deep dive into the story of the
person whose meticulous data and whose team's
photograph actually made that discovery possible.
We are exploring a name you almost certainly
recognize, but a story you probably only think
you know. And that is Rosalind Franklin. And
to do that, we are pulling from a fantastic,
incredibly comprehensive historical and biographical
compilation. It details her entire life, her
personal letters, her lab notebooks, and just
the broader context of mid -century scientific
research. OK, let's unpack this. Our mission
for this deep dive is to rescue Rosalind Franklin
from simply being a flattened historical footnote.
Yeah, a caricature. Exactly. For decades. She
has been tightly boxed in as either the wronged
heroine or the dark lady of DNA. We want to discover
the brilliant, witty, and fiercely meticulous
physical chemist behind that pervasive myth.
And beyond the drama, we want to understand the
literal nuts and bolts of how she mapped the
secret of life. If we connect this to the bigger
picture, Franklin's story is a profound master
class in how science actually works in practice.
How so? Well, society loves the myth of the solitary
genius, right? Having a Thed in Eureka moment
in a vacuum. Oh sure, the light bulb going off.
Right, but the reality is a messy, intensely
human endeavor. It's full of overlapping research,
agonizingly slow data gathering, and you know,
inevitably clashing personalities. And long before
those personalities clashed over biology, she
was already proving her genius in a in a completely
different field. Yeah, people forget about her
early life. They really do. Born in 1920 into
an affluent Jewish family in London, she was
recognized incredibly early as a childhood math
prodigy. I mean, we're talking about a kid who
literally did complex arithmetic for pleasure
at age six. Which is just wild. It is, but...
Before she could map the microscopic blueprint
of human genetics, she had to master the microscopic
architecture of fuel. Right, because during World
War II, she fulfilled her national service by
taking a position at the British Coal Utilization
Research Association. So she wasn't just doing
administrative work? No, not at all. She wasn't
just doing basic chemistry either. She was tasked
with studying the invisible microscopic porosity
of coal. So she used helium gases to determine
the precise density of different types of...
Right? Exactly. She was figuring out the mathematical
relationship between the tiny invisible constrictions
in the pores of the coal and how permeable the
material actually was. Yeah, trying to see what
could get through and what couldn't. It reminds
me of like a bouncer at a really exclusive microscopic
club. Huh. That's a good way to put it. She was
observing exactly which molecules were allowed
to enter or exit those microscopic doors as the
temperature changed. And she ultimately proved
that substances were expelled from the coal in
strict order of their molecular size as things
heated up. And this work accurately predicted
how different coals would perform for specific
fuel purposes. And crucially, for the production
of wartime devices like gas masks, which rely
on carbon to filter out toxins. So this wasn't
just some abstract academic exercise. I mean,
it had immediate survival implications for a
nation at war. That is incredible context. Yeah.
But how does coal filtering gas translate to
the rest of her career, like moving to biology?
Well, from a career perspective, this intensive
wartime research laid the foundational data for
her PhD at Cambridge. It gave her a lifelong,
highly specialized expertise in something called
the physical chemistry of solid organic colloids.
Wait, let me pause you there. Solid organic colloids.
That sounds like serious textbook jargon. What
exactly are we talking about? Right, sorry. So
a colloid is essentially a substance where microscopic
particles of one material are suspended inside
another. Okay. When we talk about solid organic
colloids in Franklin's case, we are talking about
carbon -based solids like coal or graphite that
don't have a simple neat uniform structure. So
they're messy. Very messy. They are solid, but
they are filled with these complex microscopic
networks and pores. She became an absolute master
of understanding how carbon structures itself
on an invisible level. But to truly master the
techniques needed to see that invisible world,
she eventually had to leave post -war England,
right? Yes. In 1947, she packed up and moved
to the vibrant, intellectually stimulating Laboratories
of Paris. And she accepted a position at Jacques
Meringue's lab at the State Chemical Services.
Her time in France is where we really see her
personality blossom outside the rigid confines
of the British academic system. She absolutely
fell in love with the French lifestyle. Yeah,
she embraced the food, the culture, the intense
intellectual debates over dinner. She went on
these incredibly daring treks in the Alps. At
one point, she actually slipped off a steep slope
and nearly lost her life. Which is terrifying.
Right. And she wrote letters home expressing
how the French way of life was vastly superior
to the stiff English complacency she was used
to. She definitely had strong opinions. She did.
But inside the lab, she was learning a highly
specialized skill that would change history,
the art of x -ray crystallography. And Merring
wasn't just teaching her standard crystallography.
He was pioneering the application of x -ray diffraction
to amorphous substances. Amorphous. Yeah, things
like coal, rayon, and other messy carbonaceous
materials. Now wait, I have to push back on this
for a second. Because my basic understanding
of crystallography is that you need a crystal.
Right. Like a neat, orderly, repeating geometric
shape, like a diamond or a grain of salt. Yeah.
How do you take a clear X -ray picture of something
that is amorphous, something that essentially
has no regular repeating shape? What's fascinating
here is that you've hit on the exact reason Franklin
was so uniquely positioned for her later work.
Oh, really? Yeah. Taking an X -ray diffraction
image of a perfect crystal is relatively straightforward.
You shoot an x -ray beam at the crystal, the
rays bounce off the perfectly regular atomic
planes, and they hit photographic film to give
you a clean, predictable pattern of spots. Makes
sense. But, amorphous substances are inherently
chaotic. They don't have that perfect repeating
order. When you shoot x -rays through them, you
don't get a neat grid of dots. You get these
diffuse, blurry, highly complex halos and smears
on the film. So it's like trying to map the architectural
structure of a cloud instead of a brick wall.
That cloud analogy is spot on. Franklin had to
learn the incredibly difficult mathematics required
to interpret those blurry, chaotic shadows. Wow.
She had to mathematically correct for the finite
height of the x -ray beam, interpret the diffuse
scattering of light. I mean, she was quite literally
wringing geometric structure out of total physical
chaos. That sounds impossible. And that specific,
highly difficult skill set is what made her the
singular perfect person to eventually look at
biological fibers. Biological materials are notoriously
messy, pliable, and incredibly difficult to crystallize.
But mapping the chaotic structure of coal and
graphite was just the warm -up, right? Exactly.
The ultimate test of this unique skill wasn't
going to be fuel. It was going to be the messy,
chaotic fibers of human genetics. And that meant
returning to London. Back to the stiff English
complacency. Yeah. In 1951, she is recruited
to King's College London to work in the Medical
Research Council's biophysics unit. She is stepping
straight into a scientific gold rush because
everyone in the field wants to crack the elusive
structure of DNA. Oh, it was a massive race.
But she's also stepping blindly into a legendary
personality clash. Right. The director of the
unit, John Randall, made a fatal compounding
error in his administrative communication. What
did he do? He sent a letter explicitly assigning
Franklin to work on analyzing DNA fibers and
assigned a graduate student named Raymond Gosling
to be her assistant. The problem is that he completely
failed to communicate this restructuring to Maurice
Wilkins. And Wilkins was another senior researcher
there. Yeah, who had already been pioneering
DNA diffraction work at the very same lab. Right.
And Wilkins was actually away on holiday when
Randall set all this up. So Wilkins comes back
expecting Franklin to be a highly skilled technician
joining his team Well, Franklin has a formal
letter from the director essentially saying you
are an independent investigator in charge of
this project It was an absolute recipe for disaster
and that tension was instantly amplified by their
totally opposite personalities. Their fundamental
communication styles could not have been more
different. Wilkins was notoriously shy, he spoke
slowly, he was highly calculating with his words,
and he actively avoided looking people directly
in the eye, finding it too confrontational. And
Franklin was a polar opposite. She was concise,
she was impatient with slow talkers, she was
highly direct, and she had a habit of looking
people intensely. right in the eye when she debated
them. Which really threw people off. Yeah, it
unnerved her male colleagues who were used to
a more demure deferential dynamic. So you have
this massive fundamental friction from day one.
But Franklin ignores the office politics, puts
her head down, and goes to work with Gosling.
And she brings her physical chemistry genius
to the equipment itself. She took the micro camera
that Wilkins had ordered before she arrived and
she rigorously re -engineered it. How did she
change it? Well, the critical innovation she
brought to King's College was designing a camera
chamber where she could precisely control the
humidity around the DNA sample using different
saturated salt solutions. Here's where it gets
really interesting. DNA isn't a static rock.
It's a biological molecule. It changes depending
on its environment. By controlling the humidity
using those salts, Franklin was essentially forcing
the DNA to pose under perfect studio lighting.
She discovered that DNA could actually exist
in two entirely distinct structural forms, depending
on how much water it absorbed. When she kept
the humidity high, above 75%, the DNA fiber stretched
out and soaked up the water. It became long and
thin. She called this the wet or bee form. Right,
the bee form. But when she dried the chamber
out, the DNA contracted. It became short and
fat, which she called the crystalline, or A,
form. And separating these two forms was a monumental
breakthrough. Before she instituted this humidity
control, researchers had been taking x -rays
of DNA that was a messy mixture of both forms.
Which just gives you a blur. Exactly. It resulted
in a confused, overlapping smudge of a picture.
By separating them into pure A and pure B samples,
she finally brought the molecule into sharp mathematical
focus. Because the interpersonal tension with
Wilkins had become so toxic, the director officially
split the DNA work between them. Wilkins took
the wet B form, and Franklin took the data -rich
crystalline A form. And we have to highlight
a fantastic anecdote from the sources regarding
her sense of humor during this split. Oh, the
funeral notice. Yes. In the summer of 1952, Franklin
was temporarily unconvinced that her crystalline
A -form was actually a helix. Her data wasn't
showing it clearly yet. Wilkins, on the other
hand, firmly believed everything in biology was
a helix. So what did she do? As a highly targeted
practical joke on Wilkins, Franklin and her student
Gosling actually wrote up a satirical, black
-bordered funeral notice. Oh, I love this detail.
The card literally read, it is with great regret
that we have to announce the death of DNA helix
crystalline. Death followed a protracted illness.
A memorial service will be held next Monday or
Tuesday. It's so good. It completely punctures
the m - that she was this joyless hyper -serious
drone. She had a biting brilliant wit. It definitely
highlights her personality, but more importantly,
it underscores her core scientific philosophy.
She was fiercely dedicated to pure experimental
data over speculative theoretical model building.
Right, no guessing. Exactly. While other scientists
were eager to rush ahead and guess the structure,
her steadfast attitude was, we are going to let
the spots on this photograph tell us what the
structure is. She absolutely refused to build
a model until the math dictated it. But while
she was meticulously calculating those spots
in London, a very different Highly speculative
approach was happening over at Cambridge University.
Yes, a totally different vibe. James Watson and
Francis Crick were in a frantic race to build
the ultimate theoretical model out of wire and
metal plates. And this brings us to the 1953
climax, which is arguably the most famous controversy
in modern biology. To understand this controversy,
we need to lay out the events of early 1953 neutrally,
based firmly on the historical record. Okay,
let's do it. In January of that year, Watson
visited King's College. Wilkins, who was commiserating
with Watson over some shared frustrations regarding
Franklin, showed Watson the now legendary photo
51. Which was her team's photo. Right, the incredibly
clear x -ray diffraction image of the B -form
DNA, which had been taken under Franklin's supervision
by Raymond Gosling. Watson famously wrote years
later that seeing that specific image made his
jaw fall open and his pulse race. The dramatic
cross shape of the X pattern clearly screened
helix. But it wasn't just the photograph that
helped Cambridge crack the code. No. Over in
Ambridge, Crick's thesis advisor, Max Peretz,
had obtained a copy of a medical research council
report. Wait, how? It was a routine report from
a biophysics committee visit to King's College,
but it contained a summary of Franklin's crucial
unpublished crystallographic calculations. Peretz
handed this report over to Crick. Wait, let's
slow down and look at what was actually in that
report because this is where the pure biology
turns into. heavy math. Sure. The sources mention
the report confirmed the 24 angstrom repeat distance.
What exactly is an angstrom and what does a repeat
distance look like on a microscopic level? An
angstrom is a unit of measurement used to express
the sizes of atoms and molecules. It is one 10
billionth of a meter, unfathomably small. The
repeat distance of 34 angstroms essentially told
them the exact pitch of the spiral staircase.
It told them exactly how much vertical space
the DNA helix takes to make one complete 360
degree twist. OK, that makes sense. You need
to know how steep the stairs are before you build
the staircase. Exactly. But the report also established
that the structure had C2 symmetry. Now, I know
what symmetry is when I look in a mirror, but
how does a math term like C2 symmetry tell a
biologist how to build a model? Imagine two identical
spiral staircases placed side by side. Okay,
I'm picturing it. If you rotate the entire structure
180 degrees, flipping it upside down, and it
looks completely unchanged, that is C2 symmetry.
Wow. For DNA to have C2 symmetry, Crick realized
instantly that the two strands wrapping around
each other must run in opposite directions. It's
like a two -way street. One strand goes up, the
other strand goes down. They are parallel but
anti -parallel. That is brilliant. So... armed
with Franklin's parameters, the unmistakable
helix shape from the photo, the 34 angst from
twist, the anti -parallel strands, and her earlier
crucial realization that the bulky phosphate
backbone had to be on the outside of the molecule.
Watson and Crick successfully built their double
helix model in March 1953. And they published
their triumph in the journal Nature with only
a highly muted footnote saying they were stimulated
by a knowledge of the general nature of the unpublished
experimental results. of Wilkins and Franklin.
For decades since, the narrative has been heavily
framed as a great scientific heist. You know,
the popular idea is that Franklin was a brilliant,
but isolated experimentalist toiling away in
the dark, entirely unaware that the Cambridge
boys had snuck in and stolen her data to win
the race. But I want to actively challenge that
traditional heist narrative based on the incredible
sources we have. Yeah. What she truly robbed
in the dark. Because our materials bring up some
astonishing revelations published in 2023 involving
an unpublished draft for Time magazine written
by journalist named Joan Bruce back in 19 - That
unpublished time article completely shifts our
historical perspective. It really does. Joan
Bruce had actually consulted directly with Franklin
for the piece, and Bruce clearly wrote that the
two teams, Kings and Cambridge, were actually
linking up. confirming each other's work and
wrestling over a common problem. Right. Bruce
noted that Franklin was routinely checking the
Cambridge theoretical model against her own hard
x -ray data. It wasn't a blind robbery, it was
a joint effort where vital information was being
shared, even if the interpersonal dynamics between
the players were deeply flawed and competitive.
And the science historians pointing this out
emphasize that in 1953, the discovery wasn't
seen by the scientific community as a definitive
race, one solely by Watson and Crick, but as
the outcome of a collaborative, albeit incredibly
messy effort. Right. But the most heartbreaking
part to me is what her own private lab notebooks
reveal. She wasn't just a technician taking pretty
pictures for the men to analyze. Did she actually
know it was a double helix before they published?
She absolutely did. Her later Birkbeck colleague,
Aaron Klug, meticulously analyzed her rough drafts
from February and March of 1953. Her notebooks
definitively proved she had independently realized
that BDNA was a double helical molecule. Wow.
She noted the two strands. She noted the structural
similarities between the A and B forms. She even
realized that the structure could hold an infinite
variety of nucleotide sequences, which perfectly
explained the biological specificity of DNA.
She just didn't see the specific complementary
base pairing mechanism, the rums of the ladder
connecting the two strands that Watson and Crick
managed to figure out with their cardboard cutouts.
It is a profound tragedy of timing. As historians
have pointed out, she simply ran out of time
to make those final conceptual leaps because
Watson and Crick beat her to the punch. And she
was so strict about her data. Exactly. As a rigorous,
data -driven experimentalist, she simply wasn't
willing to publish a speculative model until
her mathematics completely and undeniably proved
it. Most people assume her story ends there,
you know, fading into the shadow of the DNA double
helix. But her actual scientific magnum opus
was just beginning. Yes. In mid -March, 1953,
she leaves King's College. A move she bluntly
described as going from a palace to the slums
and sets up her own independent research group
at Birkbeck College. Moving to Birkbeck allowed
her to pivot away from DNA entirely. She shifted
her focus to RNA, specifically investigating
the structure of viruses, and here she achieves
monumental undisputed success. She takes on the
tobacco mosaic virus, or TMV. Now, at the time,
eminent virologists around the world had all
sorts of conflicting theories about how this
virus was physically structured. Most thought
it was a solid clump. But Franklin uses her x
-ray crystallography magic and proves them all
wrong. How did she figure out his actual shape?
Well, by meticulously analyzing the diffraction
patterns, she mapped the precise location of
the molecules. She discovered that the virus
wasn't a solid mass. It was a hollow tube composed
of proteins. A tube? Yes. Furthermore, she proved
that the genetic material, the RNA, wasn't just
floating around randomly inside the tube. It
was deeply helically wound along the inner surface
of that hollow structure. That's amazing. She
coordinated a massive effort bringing in international
collaborators and managing a brilliant team that
included future Nobel laureates. And she didn't
just write dense academic papers about it. For
the 1958 Brussels World's Fair, she commissioned
a massive five -foot -high physical model of
the tobacco mosaic virus so the public could
see it. I love that. And I absolutely love this
detail. She built it using table tennis balls
and plastic bicycle handlebar grips to represent
the proteins and RNA. So what does this all mean?
To me, it shows a deeply practical scientist
who wasn't just dealing in abstract, invisible
math. She literally brought the microscopic world
into the human realm where everyday people could
touch it, see it, and understand it. This raises
an important question to consider regarding her
trajectory. How much more could she have achieved
if she had been given the time? Because right
as she was pivoting, her group to research the
live poliovirus securing the largest research
grant Birkbeck College had ever seen, her health
rapidly failed. While traveling in the United
States in 1956, she noticed her stomach bulging.
and began experiencing severe pain. She was diagnosed
with advanced ovarian cancer, but she refused
to stop. She was relentless. Even while undergoing
brutal cancer treatments, she and her research
group published seven major papers in 1956 and
six more in 1957. She kept working, analyzing
data, and directing her team until she physically
couldn't anymore. She passed away in April 1958
at the tragically young age of just 37. The foundational
work she started at Birkbeck didn't die with
her, though. Her trusted colleague, Aaron Klug,
who she deliberately made the principal beneficiary
of her will, continued her exact line of structural
elucidation of viruses. And he won a Nobel, right?
He did. He went on to win the Nobel Prize in
chemistry in 1982, explicitly building upon the
very work she had initiated and led. Which naturally
brings us to the complex debate surrounding her
legacy and what some historians now call the
Roslund industry. Oh boy. Yes. Ten years after
her death, James Watson published his incredibly
famous memoir, The Double Helix, and he paints
a deeply unflattering, highly subjective portrait
of her. He constantly refers to her as Rosie,
a patronizing nickname she absolutely hated.
She always preferred Rosalind. Yeah, that book
caused a lot of damage. He portrayed her as incredibly
difficult, hostile, and essentially framed her
as a stubborn technician who couldn't even interpret
her own data. And that specific portrayal sparked
a massive cultural backlash. In 1975, her personal
friend Anne Serre published a biography that
fired back aggressively. Serre framed Franklin
as a brilliant woman systematically suppressed
by rampant sexism at King's College. So it's
the total opposite. Right. Serre's book essentially
turned Franklin into a wronged feminist icon,
arguing she was excluded from the male dining
rooms and constantly patronized by her inferior
male peers. But the sources show that even that
counter narrative is hotly contested. We have
to look at all sides of the historical record
impartially here. Franklin's own sister, Jennifer
Glenn, has argued strongly against both Watson's
demeaning depiction and Sarah's feminist icon
framing. Her sister states clearly that the stories
of her father opposing her education were complete
myths, that Roslyn was absolutely not a feminist
in the modern sense, and that she would have
been just as embarrassed by the wronged heroin
industry as she was by Watson's dismissive book.
The truth, as is almost always the case in history,
exists somewhere in the complex, nuanced middle.
There is no denying the intense interpersonal
friction she experienced, nor the stark reality
of navigating the world as a female scientist
in the 1950s. But continually reducing her to
a victim of circumstance overshadows her immense,
undeniable agency, her sharp humor, and her raw
brilliance as a scientist. So why does her story
matter to you today? Why do we spend time unpacking
the life of an x -ray crystallographer from the
1950s? I think it's a powerful testament to the
supreme value of rigorous evidence -based work.
Well said. We live in a world today that is completely
obsessed with being the first to speak, the first
to publish, the first to claim the breakthrough
on social media. Rosalind Franklin reminds us
that truth doesn't care who gets to the microphone
first. Truth is found in the data. She left the
spots on the photographs speak for themselves.
And her story leaves us with a fascinating historical
hypothetical to ponder. The Nobel Prize rules
strictly prohibit posthumous awards. That is
the official reason why she wasn't included when
Watson, Crick, and Wilkins won the prize for
DNA in 1962. But imagine if those rigid rules
didn't exist. Right. If she hadn't died so tragically
young, and if she had stood on that stage in
Stockholm in 1962 to accept the Nobel Prize alongside
them, or perhaps lived to share the 1982 prize
with Aaron Klug for her virus work, how would
we remember her today? It changes everything.
Would we still view her as a tragic hero, a symbol
of stolen glory and scientific injustice? Or
would society simply and rightfully recognize
her as one of the most brilliant foundational
structural architects of the 20th century? Changing
that one variable changes the entire length through
which we view her place in scientific history.
She ceases to be a footnote and becomes a towering
pillar of the field. So the next time you see
that famous blurry gray smudge of photo 51, don't
just see a picture of DNA. Look past the blur.
See the bouncer of the coal pores determining
who gets in and out. See the survivor of the
Alps ringing math out of chaos. See the builder
of table tennis ball viruses. See the architect
who forced life itself to step into the light
and finally reveal its shape.