Rosalind Franklin

Rosalind Franklin established her competitiveness early in life. She donned the uncomfortable mantle of competition in a male-dominated field at age sixteen when she chose to take more difficult areas of scientific courses usually spurned by other girls. By twenty-five submitted her Ph.D. thesis on a noticeably non-feminine topic – how holes in coal are affected by heat. After finishing her doctoral work, she enjoyed an idyllic four-year stint in Paris, where she gained expertise in the new field of crystallography.

Having always planned to return to London, she applied for a position at the biophysics lab at King’s College in 1951 to investigate the structure of biological fibers of interest, which we now know to be DNA. Working with congenial and cultured colleagues in Paris while living in a garret contrasted starkly with the “intellectually mediocre” colleagues and the cellar lab built around a bomb crater from the war she experienced at King’s College. In addition, she was expected to share the project with a deputy director she despised and had no respect for. Being female in a male field necessitated Franklin’s caution when asserting new data. Her theories had to be flawless or she risked never being taken seriously.

Were her angry rejections, “brusque combativeness” and other behaviors notable because she was a woman? Watson implied to Rosalind that she was incompetent at interpreting her own X-rays; why are we surprised that she reacted in anger? Would a male in the same situation even been questioned on this point, much less openly insulted? The question of cultural differences also rears its head. Was this intelligent and opinionated Jewess a threat to the English and American men who rarely had occasion to work with a woman on a peer basis, much less a woman of a distinctly different culture where woman are encouraged to speak freely? Culturally in the post-World War II period, men tolerated women in the workforce only because of the role they’d played during the war. Women were not accepted as equals.

It seems evident that Wilkins shared the Nobel Prize – not for any scientific contribution made, but for both his role as a go-between for the Cambridge and London labs and his “Y” chromosome.

In a final coup de’gras, genetics betrayed her once more when ovarian cancer ended her life at age thirty-eight.