Discrimination can be like the structure of an atom: Even if you can’t see it with the naked eye, you know it’s there.
What Rosalind Franklin faced in her scientific career might not have been overt sexism — no one stood at the laboratory door, arms akimbo, and barred her entrance — but rather a subtle, insidious refusal to take her seriously. Yet without her efforts, the two men who mapped the structure of DNA could not have made their discovery 50 years ago Friday.
As the world prepares to mark that anniversary, some are pausing to remember as well the woman who did the spadework for understanding DNA, yet received none of the public credit — and to ask if such a miscarriage of justice could happen again.
“It could,” says Brenda Maddox, whose biography, “Rosalind Franklin: The Dark Lady of DNA,” was published last year. “Women are making their way very slowly in the sciences.”
Astrophysicist Margaret Geller, who works on mapping the distribution of galaxies, concurs: “Of course what happened to her could happen today. It remains very difficult for women to obtain recognition for their intellectual achievements in science.”
Few people outside the scientific community have heard of Franklin, who died in 1958 at age 37. But it was her meticulous research that tipped off James Watson and Francis Crick that the DNA molecule was a double helix — a now-famous archetype that one writer dubbed “the Mona Lisa of science” — and revealed its significance in the transfer of genetic information from cell to cell and, ultimately, from generation to generation.
Watson and Crick were awarded the 1962 Nobel Prize for their discovery. Pivotal to the breakthrough, however, were the X-ray photographs of the DNA molecule made by Franklin, a British crystallographer who specialized in producing marvelously detailed images of microscopic structures, images that required hundreds of hours to develop. In 1953, as various groups were vying to nail down the structure and function of DNA, Franklin’s former lab partner, Maurice Wilkins, showed her photographs to Watson and Crick behind her back, setting the stage for the duo’s “Eureka!” moment. The crucial image, called Photograph 51, distinctly showed the twined strand that would constitute what is routinely acknowledged as the most significant scientific discovery in the second half of the 20th Century.
As Watson recounts in “The Double Helix” (1968), his memoir about the race to unlock the secret of life, “The instant I saw the picture my mouth fell open and my pulse began to race.” In the same book, which became a best seller, Watson is dismissive of Franklin and her work, complaining about her clothes and her appearance.
“The best home for a feminist,” he added, “is someone else’s lab.” Franklin died of ovarian cancer — doubtless brought on, in part, by exposure to radiation during many years of X-ray work, Maddox observes — before the issue of her contribution could be addressed. Would it happen like that today?
“I want to say it would happen much less frequently,” says Londa Schiebinger, a professor of the history of science at The Pennsylvania State University and author of “Has Feminism Changed Science?” (1999). “But few inroads have been made. I don’t find the sense that this has all been taken care of.”
While the number of women in all branches of the sciences has been steadily increasing, a misogynistic attitude persists, says Geller, a senior scientist at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory in Cambridge, Mass. “Women have much less access to the resources necessary to hold on to major [research] results,” she says. “They do not have the administrative positions and receive fewer financial resources.”
“Their groups are smaller or non-existent,” adds Geller, who in 1975 was only the second woman ever to earn a doctorate in physics at Princeton University. Often what they face, Geller and others report, is not overt, in-your-face prejudice but a nettlesome, discouraging “boys’ club” atmosphere such as that that prevailed at King’s College in London just after World War II, when Franklin, the bright young woman with a PhD in physical chemistry from Cambridge University, arrived and began work.
Franklin hailed from a wealthy Jewish family in London and could be abrupt and abrasive with colleagues of lesser accomplishment, recounts Maddox. But then again, when men are similarly focused, they are regarded as brilliant and driven. She clashed with her lab partner, Wilkins, who once described Franklin in a note to Watkins and Crick — a note rejoicing over the news that Franklin had decided to move to a lab at another college — as “the dark lady,” a reference that might be construed as anti-Semitic. Frustrated at his inability to get along with her, Wilkins resorted to buying her a box of chocolates — a gesture that reportedly irritated Franklin. She wanted respect and equality, not candy.
As Maddox details in her biography, Franklin was a scrupulous, painstaking researcher who insisted that hard facts must underlie theories. To approach the question that was preoccupying scientists of the day — how is genetic information passed on? — she took myriad X-rays of the DNA molecule to ascertain its structure. Watson and Crick, conversely, spent their time constructing models of potential configurations, but their lack of grounding in chemistry constantly tripped them up. Linus Pauling, the eminent American scientist who also was involved in the race to map DNA in the early 1950s, dismissed Watson and Crick as “two pitchmen in search of a helix,” Maddox reports.
Detailing the double helix
Armed with Franklin’s Photograph 51, however, Watson and Crick were finally able to detail the double helix correctly. On Feb. 28, 1953, Watson records in his memoir, Crick raced into a pub and told his friends that the secret of life was a secret no more. “In the excitement of the discovery,” Maddox writes, “it seems to have escaped their notice that while Rosalind’s work was fundamental to their discovery, she had not been consulted on its use.”
Franklin died before Watson and Crick became household names on the back of her work. It was only in 1975, when Anne Sayre, a friend, published a biography of Franklin that the world at large became aware of her contribution.
But Franklin wasn’t the only female scientist so neglected. Women who made major yet generally unrecognized contributions to 20th Century science include Lise Meitner, a physicist who first detailed nuclear fission, and Jocelyn Bell Burnell, an astronomer who discovered pulsars. And for every Meitner and Burnell, there is a woman who seemingly had the capacity to make major scientific advances but did not receive the same encouragement — familial or financial — as a similarly talented man did. Albert Einstein’s first wife, Mileva Maric, was a promising physicist when they met. While she kept house for him and raised their child, he was collaborating with scientific colleagues, benefiting from the intense intellectual interactions from which the great breakthroughs often arise.
Dennis Overbye, author of “Einstein in Love” (2000), notes, “While Einstein went off to conferences, Mileva wound up staying home and making sandwiches.”
As Schiebinger details in her book, women worldwide got a late start in science, only making inroads in the historically male-only field “after the women’s movement of the 1870s and 1880s propelled them into universities.” But progress was slow and halting, she recounts. In the United States after World War II, the number of women faculty members in university science departments decreased, as men coming back from the war were granted top spots and preferential hiring.
The future for women in science also was compromised. The GI Bill provided generous financial support for veterans — a group in which men outnumbered women by approximately 7.6 million to 400,000 — who surged ahead in graduate work in science. The number of men earning science doctorates annually between 1946 and 1960 increased from 800 to 4,000, while the number of women achieving the same distinction each year during the same period never topped 500.
Coming into their own
Women scientists fared slightly better in the 1970s, ’80s and ’90s, thanks to the women’s movement and federal anti-discrimination laws. In 1975, 34 percent of bachelor’s degrees in science went to women; by 1998, the figure was 49 percent, according to the National Science Foundation. Between 1966 and 1997, the annual percentage of people receiving doctorates in science who were female rose from 11.6 to 40.6.
While the numbers look better, however, the more subtle forms of discrimination — the kind difficult or impossible to quantify, because they involve attitude and ambience — apparently continue. Four years ago, Nancy Hopkins, a biology professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, revealed the results of a study made by the MIT administration at the request of female faculty members. Women, it seemed, routinely received less lab and office space, and smaller and less frequent research grants, than their male colleagues.
“The messages suggest that gender bias is widespread in academe,” Hopkins wrote in an article in The Chronicle of Higher Education, adding that “unconscious assumptions concerning gender can result in inequalities between male and female faculty members.” MIT is now taking steps to eliminate the disparity in its treatment of women and men in the sciences, Hopkins says.
Yet among America’s physicists, only 9 percent are female, Schiebinger reports. Women in science still are paid an average of 15 to 17 percent less than their male counterparts, her research reveals. And those who claim that women are now fully equal to men — so what’s all the fuss about? — may be startled to learn that Harvard University did not grant tenure to a woman in the chemistry department until 1989. Nor did the university bestow that most coveted of institutional head-pats to a female physicist until 1992.
Without question, there have been improvements in the way the world refers to women scientists — just as racial or ethnic epithets have been all but socially outlawed. No one could get by with the sorts of derisive slurs that were routine in Franklin’s day, Maddox says. Even Watson and Crick, whose put-downs of Franklin in the 1950s were frequent and cruel, have gotten with the program.
“They’ve learned,” Maddox says. “They’re a bit more politically correct than they used to be. They now say in public that they couldn’t have done it without her. They’ve made up for their past patronizing.”
Getting his due
Wilkins, the man who worked behind Franklin’s back to deny her credit for her contribution to the discovery of DNA, has had a taste of his own medicine. While he shared the Nobel Prize with Watson and Crick for the double helix, he is the forgotten man; schoolchildren know the names “Watson and Crick,” but no one says “Watson and Crick and Wilkins.”
The reason, Maddox speculates, lies in Watson’s prose skills. His book, “The Double Helix” made the complex science of genetics not only comprehensible to a wide audience, but also exciting.
“Watson spotted that this was a drama, a race, a narrative,” Maddox says. “I wonder if we’d even be celebrating the 50th anniversary now if he hadn’t set it up that way.”
Watkins is trying the narrative route himself; his book, “The Third Man of the Double Helix,” is scheduled for publication later this year.
But Franklin is no longer able to set the record straight, thus is at the mercy of others’ words, such as Watson’s infamous rhetoric in “The Double Helix”: “Though her features were strong, she was not unattractive and might have been quite stunning had she taken even a mild interest in clothes. This she did not. There was never lipstick to contrast with her straight black hair, while at the age of thirty-one her dresses showed all the imagination of English blue-stocking adolescents.”
Without her work, science historians agree, Watson could never have made the discovery that brought him fame and fortune. Perhaps that, more than her lack of lipstick, is what really got under his skin.
Other victims of gender discrimination
Rosalind Franklin wasn’t the only woman denied credit for her scientific discoveries and achievements. Other female scientists whose careers seemed to be adversely affected by gender include:
Mileva Maric (1875-1948)
Albert Einstein’s first wife was, like her famous husband, a scientist; in her native Serbia, she had been known as a brilliant math student. She and Albert met and fell in love in a physics class. The extent of her contribution to Einstein’s most renowned breakthrough, the special theory of relativity, is the subject of controversy, but she was known to check his figures. Einstein told a friend, “I need my wife. She solves all my mathematical problems for me,” since Mileva was the more gifted mathematician. She and Einstein were divorced in 1918, after which Mileva fell into depression and ill health. When Einstein won the 1921 Nobel Prize, the cash award — per their divorce agreement — went to Mileva.
Lise Meitner (1878-1968)
The physicist who discovered and named the process of nuclear fission in 1938 was ignored by the Nobel Prize committee, which gave the 1945 award to her research collaborator, a chemist named Otto Hahn. Meitner, born in Vienna, but forced to immigrate to Sweden when Hitler came to power, faced discrimination throughout her career because of her gender and her Jewish heritage. Editors of science journals would refuse to publish her articles when her sex was revealed, and she was never given keys to the lab in which she worked. Yet in later years, her contribution to explaining nuclear fission was widely acknowledged.
Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin (1900-1978)
The British-born astronomer discovered that stars are composed mainly of hydrogen and helium, making hydrogen the most abundant element in the universe — a thesis that was heretical in 1925, when she proposed it in her doctoral dissertation. Several years later, Gaposchkin was proven correct. While on the teaching staff at Harvard University, she had no formal status — her salary was listed by the department under the category “equipment” — despite an achievement that had changed 20th Century astronomy. In 1956, she was made the first female full professor at Harvard, after years of discrimination and neglect.
Jocelyn Bell Burnell (b. 1943)
Using a radio telescope at England’s Cambridge University, Burnell and her colleagues studied the signals emitted by stars. In 1967, the native of Belfast was intrigued by certain signals that seemed to be coming faster than others. These, it turned out, emanated from heavier, collapsed stars, and were later termed pulsars. Her research supervisor, Anthony Hewish, received the Nobel Prize for the discovery of pulsars — with no mention of Burnell.
