Would Rosalind Franklin Have Been Cancelled As a Eugenicist?

How do we know that the woman who provided Crick and Watson with data didn't share their deplorable views?

Chemist Rosalind Franklin, who worked with Maurice Wilkins and Raymond Gosling to produce x-ray images that helped Francis Crick and James D. Watson figure out the structure of DNA in 1953, has been famous for not being famous for much of the last half century.

Google’s Ngram shows Franklin as currently being mentioned in English language books more than half as often as Francis Crick and more than three times as often as Nobel Laureate Wilkins. She’s also much more famous than her grad student Gosling, who actually snapped the photos on which her fame rests. Similarly, Oswald Avery, who led the team that discovered that DNA was the hereditary material in 1944, never received a Nobel and is much less famous than Franklin today.

(I wanted to graph the considerable fame/notoriety of Crick’s partner, James D. Watson, but his name frequently shows up in books as “James Watson.” And there are lots of other James Watsons mentioned in books going back to the the first year Ngram graphs, 1800. So I gave up and figured Crick would be good enough.)

Franklin died of cancer at age 37 in 1958, so she couldn’t have won the 1962 Medicine Nobel that Crick, Watson, and Wilkins shared. The empirical vindication for the Crick-Watson double helix theory didn’t roll in until 1958-1961, too late for poor Franklin. (She also might have shared in the Chemistry Nobel won by her friend and colleague Aaron Klug in 1982 if she’d lived long enough. She got a lot done in a short life and probably would have gotten more done if she’d gotten her three score and ten.)

The Nobel is also limited to three individuals at a time.

If she had lived, it might have been reasonable for her, Wilkins, and Gosling to share the Chemistry Nobel, while Avery, Crick, and Watson shared the Medicine Nobel. After all, DNA is a really big deal, so divvying up two Nobels across six people could have made sense.

But … the Nobel folks have a rule against that kind of sharing Nobels across fields. The different committees of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences get together ahead of time and figure out how to divide discoveries among their three STEM fields with no overlapping, such as Medicine and Chemistry, allowed.

Maybe there are better rules possible, but the Royal Swedish Academy has done a fine job protecting the brand image of their three hard science Nobels over the last 124 years.

An interesting question is what would have happened to her reputation if Franklin’s fame had triumphed over Crick and Watson’s, as so many people today ardently wish to have happened, and then she lived to be 97 years old like Watson did, giving her a lifespan of 1920-2017. Would she have gotten cancelled like Watson did?

Paywall here.