Thread by @matthewcobb

70 years ago, 3 papers appeared in @Nature under the title ‘Molecular structure of nucleic acids’. In an article in Nature today (link at end) @nccomfort and I shed new light on ‘what Watson and Crick really took from Rosalind Franklin’. This thread summarises our findings. 1/23

@Nature @nccomfort Many ppl believe that Watson and Crick stole Franklin’s data when Watson glimpsed Photograph 51. Told in Watson’s The Double Helix (1968), this is not true (NC, forthcoming, shows the book is semi-fictional). But Photograph 51 is widespread in culture, eg on a UK 50p piece. 2/23

@Nature @nccomfort This image excited Watson, but on its own it merely says that DNA is a helix, which everyone agreed on. It contains no dimensions, no number of bases/repeat, no base pairing, no size of crystal, and diffraction images can be produced by more than one kind of structure. 3/23

@Nature @nccomfort If you know the structure, Ph51 makes sense: buff.ly/3n09r74 But it is not a key to structure, and was not for Watson, Crick *or Franklin*. Crick never saw it at the time, Watson only glimpsed it. In The Double Helix it became a dramatic device. 4/23

@Nature @nccomfort However, Crick and Watson were given an MRC report detailing the work of Franklin and Wilkins, that had been given to their colleague, Perutz. Some dimensions in that report guided and confirmed the structure they hit on, through, as they put it, ‘trial and error’. 5/23

@Nature @nccomfort They should have asked Franklin & Wilkins if they could use these data, but did not. Watson barely mentions the report, but in 1961 Crick gave a lecture in Oxford where he made plain how they used it (he did not mention Photograph 51, which he never saw before publication). 6/23

@Nature @nccomfort We found a 1953 letter to Crick from a student at King’s, implying that Franklin knew her MRC report data would be shared with Watson and Crick, and was relaxed about this. We found no evidence that she felt robbed—and this letter suggests that she did not feel this way. 7/23

@Nature @nccomfort We tracked Franklin’s thinking in her notebooks and understood her focus on the crystalline form of DNA (the A form), although it resisted simple interpretation. As a physical chemist, she was interested in the crystal; the B form represented the loss of structure and order. 8/23

@Nature @nccomfort This explains why Franklin did nothing with the photo. The B form, which appeared at higher humidity, was ‘distended,’ ‘distorted,’ the consequence of the loss of order as ‘the stuff ultimately dissolved’. This focus would sidetrack Franklin for several months. 9/23

@Nature @nccomfort We next found a draft article for Time magazine, written by Joan Bruce in 1953 in consultation with Franklin, which presents the discovery as the joint work of King’s and Cambridge, not as a ‘race’ won by Watson and Crick. This article was never published. 10/23

@Nature @nccomfort One of the first public presentations of the double helix, given by Franklin in June 1953 at the Royal Society Conversazione (Summer Exhibition), was signed by all 7 authors of the Nature papers – the joint work of Cambridge and King’s, just as Bruce described it. 11/23

@Nature @nccomfort Relations between Kings and Cambridge were not all good. Crick said their attitude to Franklin could be patronising (they only met her 2 or 3 times in 1951-53). Their view of her as shown in The Double Helix was skewed by Wilkins’ descriptions, such as these from 1953. 12/23

@Nature @nccomfort The 1st W&C Nature article acknowledged Wilkins & Franklin obliquely. In later pubs, they detailed what they had done and referred to the MRC report. They should have done this from the beginning. Had they done so, views of the discovery might have been different. 13/23

@Nature @nccomfort This is not the Hollywood "heist" version Watson wrote (he may have wanted to make it more exciting). But we think it's closer to what things looked like at the time—Franklin included. We’ve found no evidence of underhand behavior, or that it was seen that way by Franklin. 14/23

@Nature @nccomfort This explains why Franklin became on good terms with Watson, and a close friend of Crick’s, convalescing at his house after operations for cancer. She also discussed her data and draft articles with them – hardly the action of someone who feared they might steal her ideas. 15/23

@Nature @nccomfort She had this relaxed attitude because DNA was not yet ‘the secret of life’. The structure, which revealed function, helped change that. Before the double helix, DNA was a molecule and an idea; afterwards, it was a mechanism. Seeing the discovery thru our eyes is a mistake. 16/23

@Nature @nccomfort Franklin was a brilliant scientist. Her work was an essential part of the discovery of the double helix. She did not discover the structure, but did come very close. As Crick explained when he was nominated for the Nobel: 17/23

@Nature @nccomfort Franklin died in 1958, with obits in the New York Times, The Times, and Nature. Her friends and colleagues were devastated. Like the NYT obit, her tombstone does not mention DNA (its role was still uncertain), focusing on her work on viruses. She had a life after DNA. 18/23

@Nature @nccomfort Our account won’t dispel the feeling that Watson & Crick did something wrong. That is not our intention. But we need to think about how we know what we know about this event. Most people’s views are based, directly or indirectly, on one unreliable source – Watson’s book. 19/23

@Nature @nccomfort Our version changes the optics on the discovery. It was not a frenzied race to discover the secret of life, involving skulduggery. There was competition, but also collaboration, and a relaxed attitude to data sharing, just as in many areas of science today. 20/23

@Nature @nccomfort We are each writing a biography (MC of Crick, NC of Watson), but we did not set out to exculpate the pair. Neither of us expected to discover anything new about this affair, but the facts have changed our minds, making our views more nuanced. 21/23

@Nature @nccomfort For Franklin’s life, read Brenda Maddox’s brilliant biography. For her work after DNA, see this article by Angela Creager and Greg Morgan: buff.ly/40Bt1o3. Our books will not be out for a couple of years. 22/23

@Nature @nccomfort AI-animated gif of a photo of Franklin, made on the My Heritage website.

@Nature @nccomfort Before drawing any conclusions, please read the article, which you can find here, open access: buff.ly/3L6O2RD FIN

@Nature @nccomfort PS: If you have need any convincing that Watson’s version of Franklin as a humourless harridan is a complete travesty, check out this excerpt from an article by her friend Anne Piper (from here: buff.ly/3AscDM4)