alt Hacker News> A similar fate befell Dr. Rosalind Franklin, the chemist excluded from the Nobel awarded to her colleagues James Watson, Francis Crick, and Maurice Wilkins for the discovery of DNA.
Franklin's name is a link to a paywalled Medium article. Found a copy expecting to see some nuanced discussion about the specific contributions she made, only to find that the missing bits were that they were mean to her about her lipstick and dress selection.
Maybe it's true, maybe it's not, but making the entire debate about her looks isn't doing anyone any favors.
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"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
> Maybe it's true, maybe it's not, but making the entire debate about her looks isn't doing anyone any favors.
There isn’t really much modern “debate” about Franklin’s work, though her Wikipedia entry is much better than that particular article. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosalind_Franklin
> Franklin's name is a link to a paywalled Medium article.
I'm frustrated that in 2025, I am reading a dismissal of Franklin's contributions because someone has never heard of her and clicks on a link to Medium article to draw their conclusions. Wikipedia would be better. The 1950's was so long ago that there are (gasp) actual paper books on this history of the discovery of the double helix.
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Rosalind Franklin would never have gotten a Nobel Prize. She died from cancer in 1958, three years before the Watson, Crick and Wilkins were awarded their prize, and Nobel was very clear that his award could not be awarded posthumously. Only ~three people have gotten posthumous awards, and all of them were alive on February 1st of the year they got the award.
Wilkins (Franklin's boss) taking her data without her permission and sharing it with Watson and Crick so they could jump in at the end and analyze it faster than she did- and then not even put her name on the paper but Wilkins instead!- is truly classic academic evil. However, even if they had actually collaborated and Franklin's name had been on the paper, she would not have gotten a Nobel, due to the ovarian cancer that killed her at age 37.