The story of the discovery of the DNA double helix that has been accepted as true for more than fifty years is wrong, according to unpublished documents analyzed by biologist Matthew Cobb and historian Nathaniel Comfort.
Contrary to what has been said, it is not true that James Watson and Francis Crick discovered the double helix because they knew how to interpret a photo of the DNA that Rosalind Franklin had obtained but had not known how to decipher. Nor is it true that Watson and Crick appropriated Franklin's data and deprived her of the credit she deserved from her.
According to Cobb and Comfort, who advance their conclusions today in Nature to coincide with the 70th anniversary of the publication of the discovery of the double helix, "Franklin was an equal member of a group of four scientists working on the structure of DNA."
The relations of the other three with Franklin, the only woman of the four, were not good. But they shared data in accordance with the scientific culture of the time.
The other three members - Watson, Crick and Maurice Walkins - received the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1962 for the discovery. Rosalind Franklin, who had died at the age of 38 in 1957 from ovarian cancer, could not be awarded.
Cobb and Comfort, who are working on biographies of Watson and Crick to be published in 2025, have reached their conclusions after studying Rosalind Franklin's notes on her research, which are kept at Cambridge University. They have also analyzed a report with the results of Franklin's experiments that Crick's boss, Max Perutz, received on a visit to the institution where she worked. And they have found a report on the story of the discovery that was commissioned by Time magazine but never published.
These documents show that things did not happen as explained by James Watson in his book The Double Helix, published in 1968, which has fueled later erroneous accounts of the discovery of the structure of DNA.
A key episode in these stories is the iconic Photograph 51 obtained by Rosalind Franklin and PhD student Raymond Goslin. It is an image of DNA observed with X-ray diffraction. According to Watson's version, she went to visit Franklin at King's College London in early 1953 and they discussed. Maurice Wilkins, who also worked at King's College, showed him that same day Photograph 51 that Franklin and Goslin had obtained eight months earlier.
Watson presents this scene as "a classic eureka moment," Cobb and Comfort note. He claims that he realized right away that only a helix structure could produce that image. But it is “an absurd presumption . "Furthermore, everyone, including Watson, knew that it was impossible to deduce any precise structure from a single photograph."
What enabled Watson and Crick to decipher the structure of the double helix was their work with cardboard models in an office at Cambridge University. Watson and Crick made the models reasoning as theoretical and checked if they were on the right track using the experimental data obtained by Franklin and Wilkins.
The key data was not in Photograph 51 but in the report that Max Perutz, Chief Crick, had received on his visit to King's College. Although Watson and Crick used the data without permission, Franklin knew they had it.
In that report, Franklin already pointed out that the curves of the DNA helices were separated by a distance of 34 angstroms, that the molecule had an enormous number of atoms and that it presented a type of symmetry called C2. Crick was an expert on this kind of symmetry.
Finally, Watson, Crick, Franklin and Wilkins presented their results in three articles published in Nature on April 25, 1953, 70 years ago today. The most important of the three, which described the DNA double helix and changed the history of biology and medicine, was signed solely by Watson and Crick with no mention of Rosalind Franklin's contribution.
In a paper published the following year, Watson and Crick acknowledged that, without Franklin's data, "the formulation of our structure would have been highly unlikely, if not impossible."
"Rosalind Franklin has been reduced to the 'wronged hero' of the double helix. She deserves to be remembered not as the victim of the double helix, but as an equal for her contributions to resolving its structure," Cobb and Comfort maintain in Nature, who point out that "neither Franklin nor Wilkins ever questioned how the structure had been discovered." of the DNA.
As for the rest of the protagonists, "Francis Crick is today a more respected figure than James Watson," Nathaniel Comfort declares by email. “Watson's reputation is as negative as it was once positive. This is due in large part to his own actions, most notably his repeated comments about race genetics and intelligence."
