Few know of the contribution made by Rosalind Franklin to the discovery of DNA's double helix, writes Brenda Maddox
The secret of life, four billion years old, was unpicked in a drama that moved day by day, almost hour by hour, in early 1953. One of the co-discoverers of the secret was Rosalind Franklin, a 32-year-old physical chemist at King's College London.
But the world might never have heard of her had it not been for James Watson, who, with Francis Crick, was one of the two principals in the discovery, whose 50th anniversary is being celebrated this spring. Watson and Crick cracked the secret through their own brilliance boosted by the knowledge of Franklin's unpublished experimental results.
As Watson wrote in 1968 in The Double Helix: "Rosy, of course, did not directly give us her data. For that matter, no one at King's realized they were in our hands".
In that book (ranked, along with Ulysses, as a 20th century classic) Watson drew a picture of the terrible "Rosy", who hoarded her data, could not get along with her King's colleague Maurice Wilkins and who might have been attractive if she took off her glasses and done something novel with her hair.
Words like these were sufficient to launch the myth of Rosalind Franklin, the wronged heroine. Watson, Crick and Wilkins got the Nobel Prize in 1962 for their discovery. But by then Franklin was dead, killed by ovarian cancer in 1958.
She died never knowing that Wilkins had been the conduit through which her data had reached Watson and Crick, working at King's rival institution, King's College Cambridge.
By the time the Watson book was published, the feminist movement was well underway, and it fought back. The literary critic Mary Ellmann mocked Watson's pretence to show "the scientist as human being, with genes in the morning, girls in the evening".
Ellmann commented sarcastically: "The only contradiction of this sensible balance is Rosalind Franklin, the woman who studies DNA like a man ... why shouldn't she content herself with playing assistant to Wilkins (and over his shoulder, to Crick and Watson)?"
Watson's treatment of Rosy (a nickname she was never called to her face) called attention to the fact that women have had a raw deal in science, getting neither their share of recognition, promotions or prizes. In early March 1953 Wilkins happily wrote to Crick to say that "our dark lady is leaving us next week". Indeed, she was.
She was so unhappy at King's, where in 1951 she had transferred after four happy years in Paris, that she had arranged to transfer to Birkbeck College, another college within the University of London. King's, highly Anglican in atmosphere, had, she felt, "neither Jews nor foreigners". Neither was strictly true but at King's she felt very out of place.
Franklin was born in London in 1920 to a distinguished and wealthy Anglo-Jewish family in which it was understood that the women would not have careers but would do charity work. Defying this tradition, she became a scientist and went from St Paul's Girls' School to Newnham College, Cambridge, where she learned physical chemistry and crystallography.
Everything in her education and Jewish background had taught her to proceed with caution and not risk criticism from a hostile world. She preferred to be sure of her facts before speculation and was unwilling to risk extravagant leaps of the imagination such as Watson and Crick dared to make. She disdained their approach - building models in favour of thorough research work.
She used X-ray crystallography to probe DNA, taking pictures that exposed its hidden shape. It was when Wilkins casually showed Watson the best of these - known as Photograph 51 - that Watson realized that DNA exists in the shape of a helix.
It was only when Watson and Crick wangled a look at Rosalind's printed data (in a report that was not confidential but not expected to be circulated) that they realized that DNA's two chains ran anti-parallel.
Franklin left for Birkbeck, never knowing that Watson and Crick had, through Wilkins, seen her work. However, her own paper, along with another by Wilkins and colleagues, appeared in the historic issue of Nature on April 25th, 1953, along with the Watson-Crick paper containing this now-immortal sentence: "It has not escaped our notice that the specific paring we have postulated immediately suggests a possible copying mechanism for the genetic material."
In the years that remained to her, working brilliantly on viruses, Rosalind became very friendly with both Watson and Crick. Indeed, she went to recuperate with the Cricks after one of her operations. When she died in 1958 her boss at Birkbeck, the eminent J D Bernal upon her death, wrote that her photographs were "among the most beautiful X-ray photographs ever taken".
Today Watson and Crick say that they could not have found the double helix without Franklin's work. How much better it would have been if they had told her that to her face when she was alive.
Brenda Maddox is a biographer, born in the US and resident for more than 30 years in Britain. Previous biographies include the lives of Nora Joyce and W B Yeates. Her latest biography, Maggie, is on the life of Margaret Thatcher