Post #2056136

I learned more about this story today, and it's even funnier. The story everyone is told today is that a Jewish woman, Rosalind Franklin, took the first picture of DNA via x-ray crystallography. The gist of the problem is that things like DNA are too small to photograph, but if the structure is "crystalline", you can infer its structure indirectly through diffraction. Rosalind Franklin took these images, but they were "stolen" from her by Watson and Crick before she had a chance to study them, who then took credit for her discovery. This story is everywhere, and has been used to, basically, rewrite the story of DNA's discovery. Any text book on the subject of x-ray diffraction has a section on this, it's pretty much the "pbuh" of optics. But what really happened is that her grad student, Raymond Gosling (almost literally me!), took the photos. She thought they showed that there wasn't a helix structure, and so abandoned the research (and in fact, held a mock funeral for the helix model of DNA soon after). Raymond Gosling and Maurice Wilkins (Gosling's original graduate advisor and named mockingly in the "obituary") disagreed with Franklin. Gosling gave the photos to Wilkins, who then passed them to Watson and Crick, who correctly recognized it's structure, and advanced the research further. Ultimately the three of them were given the Nobel prize for their research. The actual issue is that they never got permission from Franklin to use her photos. At the same time, she didn't recognize what they showed, so much so that her own grad student decided to go rogue and smuggle them to other scientists. RT: https://poa.st/objects/e19cb074-a017-4a62-9898-7778c22be494