Rosalind Franklin Quotes

Science and everyday life cannot and should not be separated.

We wish to discuss a structure for the salt of deoxyribose nucleic acid. (D.N.A.). This structure has novel features which are of considerable biologic interest.

In 2010, the Royal Society, the world’s best-known scientific organization, put together a list of the ten most influential women in the history of British science. Anning turns up there, along with such notables as Rosalind Franklin, of DNA fame.

The British molecular biologist Rosalind Franklin, who played a central part in discovering the structure of DNA but suffered from the heavy chauvinism of her male colleagues.

You frequently state, and in your letter you imply, that I have developed a completely one-sided outlook and look at everything in terms of science. Obviously my method of thought and reasoning is influenced by a scientific training – if that were not so my scientific training will have been a waste and a failure. But you look at science (or at least talk of it) as some sort of demoralizing invention of man, something apart from real life, and which must be cautiously guarded and kept separate from everyday existence. But science and everyday life cannot and should not be separated. Science, for me, gives a partial explanation of life. In so far as it goes, it is based on fact, experience and experiment. Your theories are those which you and many other people find easiest and pleasantest to believe, but so far as I can see, they have no foundation other than they leaf to a pleasanter view of life (and an exaggerated idea of our own importance)... I agree that faith is essential to success in life (success of any sort) but I do not accept your definition of faith, i.e. belief in life after death. In my view, all that is necessary for faith is the belief that by doing our best we shall come nearer to success and that success in our aims (the improvement of the lot of mankind, present and future) is worth attaining. Anyone able to believe in all that religion implies obviously must have such faith, but I maintain that faith in this world is perfectly possible without faith in another world… It has just occurred to me that you may raise the question of the creator. A creator of what? ... I see no reason to believe that a creator of protoplasm or primeval matter, if such there be, has any reason to be interested in our significant race in a tiny corner of the universe, and still less in us, as still more significant individuals. Again, I see no reason why the belief that we are insignificant or fortuitous should lessen our faith – as I have defined it.

Science and everyday life cannot and should not be separated. Science, for me, gives a partial explanation of life ... I do not accept your definition of faith i.e. belief in life after death ... Your faith rests on the future of yourself and others as individuals, mine in the future and fate of our successors. It seems to me that yours is the more selfish ... [as to] the question of a creator. A creator of what? ... I see no reason to believe that a creator of protoplasm or primeval matter, if such there be, has any reason to be interested in our insignificant race in a tiny corner of the universe.

By and large, people who choose to go into science are not greatly interested in psychological problems... He liked the exactness of science, and the perfection of its truths - Humanity could be rather messy in comparison.

She discovered in a series of beautifully executed researches the fundamental distinction between carbons that turned on heating into graphite and those that did not. Further she related this difference to the chemical constitution of the molecules from which carbon was made. She was already a recognized authority in industrial physico-chemistry when she chose to abandon this work in favour of the far more difficult and more exciting fields of biophysics. {Bernal on the death of scientist Rosalind Franklin}

Wielding imaging techniques such as X-ray crystallography, which is what Rosalind Franklin used to find evidence of the structure of DNA, structural biologists try to discover the three-dimensional shape of molecules. Linus Pauling worked out the spiral structure of proteins in the early 1950s, which was followed by Watson and Crick’s paper on the double-helix structure of DNA.

The fact is that in two unhappy years, working in isolation except for Gosling, in a field new to her, she had come within two steps of answering the most exciting question in post-war science. What is more, she, unknowingly, had provided all the essential data for those who took the two brilliant leaps of intuition — to anti-parallel chains and base pairs — that cracked the problem.

Exactly," he answers again, with that patronizing smile. Watson's approach to science contains such a vital flaw it nearly takes my breath away. How can one call oneself a scientist and begin one's investigation with a conclusion instead of building to one only after exhaustive research?

Science IS life, dear cousin. It is the lens through which I see and experience the and make sense of the world around me, and it is my way of giving back. In solving crucial scientific mysteries at King's, I became closer and closer to the understanding of life itself. And I wouldn't undo that for anything. That IS my faith.

One of the most powerful tools for discovering structure is ‘X-ray diffraction’ or, because it is always applied to crystals of the substance of interest, ‘X-ray crystallography’. The technique has been a gushing fountain of Nobel prizes, starting with Wilhelm Röntgen’s discovery of X-rays (awarded in 1901, the first physics prize), then William and his son Laurence Bragg in 1915, Peter Debye in 1936, and continuing with Dorothy Hodgkin (1964), and culminating with Maurice Wilkins (but not Rosalind Franklin) in 1962, which provided the foundation of James Watson’s and Francis Crick’s formulation of the double-helix structure of DNA, with all its huge implications for understanding inheritance, tackling disease, and capturing criminals (a prize shared with Wilkins in 1962). If there is one technique that is responsible for blending biology into chemistry, then this is it. Another striking feature of this list is that the prize has been awarded in all three scientific categories: chemistry, physics, and physiology and medicine, such is the range of the technique and the illumination it has brought.

In 1950, a thirty-year-old scientist named Rosalind Franklin arrived at King’s College London to study the shape of DNA. She and a graduate student named Raymond Gosling created crystals of DNA, which they bombarded with X-rays. The beams bounced off the crystals and struck photographic film, creating telltale lines, spots, and curves. Other scientists had tried to take pictures of DNA, but no one had created pictures as good as Franklin had. Looking at the pictures, she suspected that DNA was a spiral-shaped molecule—a helix. But Franklin was relentlessly methodical, refusing to indulge in flights of fancy before the hard work of collecting data was done. She kept taking pictures. Two other scientists, Francis Crick and James Watson, did not want to wait. Up in Cambridge, they were toying with metal rods and clamps, searching for plausible arrangements of DNA. Based on hasty notes Watson had written during a talk by Franklin, he and Crick put together a new model. Franklin and her colleagues from King’s paid a visit to Cambridge to inspect it, and she bluntly told Crick and Watson they had gotten the chemistry all wrong. Franklin went on working on her X-ray photographs and growing increasingly unhappy with King’s. The assistant lab chief, Maurice Wilkins, was under the impression that Franklin was hired to work directly for him. She would have none of it, bruising Wilkins’s ego and leaving him to grumble to Crick about “our dark lady.” Eventually a truce was struck, with Wilkins and Franklin working separately on DNA. But Wilkins was still Franklin’s boss, which meant that he got copies of her photographs. In January 1953, he showed one particularly telling image to Watson. Now Watson could immediately see in those images how DNA was shaped. He and Crick also got hold of a summary of Franklin’s unpublished research she wrote up for the Medical Research Council, which guided them further to their solution. Neither bothered to consult Franklin about using her hard-earned pictures. The Cambridge and King’s teams then negotiated a plan to publish a set of papers in Nature on April 25, 1953. Crick and Watson unveiled their model in a paper that grabbed most of the attention. Franklin and Gosling published their X-ray data in another paper, which seemed to readers to be a “me-too” effort. Franklin died of cancer five years later, while Crick, Watson, and Wilkins went on to share the Nobel prize in 1962. In his 1968 book, The Double Helix, Watson would cruelly caricature Franklin as a belligerent, badly dressed woman who couldn’t appreciate what was in her pictures. That bitter fallout is a shame, because these scientists had together discovered something of exceptional beauty. They had found a molecular structure that could make heredity possible.

Elizabeth David’s highly popular book Mediterranean Cooking

It has been suggested that she was plodding, that she could not understand her own data or work in teams, accept criticism or use imagination. That none of these alleged inadequacies manifested themselves in Rosalind’s work on viruses or coal is ignored by her detractors

Although the nucleus might have been recognized by Antonie van Leeuwenhoek in the late 17th century, it was not until 1831 that it was reported as a specific structure in orchid epidermal cells by a Scottish botanist, Robert Brown (better known for recognizing ‘Brownian movement’ of pollen grains in water). In 1879, Walther Flemming observed that the nucleus broke down into small fragments at cell division, followed by re-formation of the fragments called chromosomes to make new nuclei in the daughter cells. It was not until 1902 that Walter Sutton and Theodor Boveri independently linked chromosomes directly to mammalian inheritance. Thomas Morgan’s work with fruit flies (Drosophila) at the start of the 20th century showed specific characters positioned along the length of the chromosomes, followed by the realization by Oswald Avery in 1944 that the genetic material was DNA. Some nine years later, James Watson and Francis Crick showed the structure of DNA to be a double helix, for which they shared the Nobel Prize in 1962 with Maurice Wilkins, whose laboratory had provided the evidence that led to the discovery. Rosalind Franklin, whose X-ray diffraction images of DNA from the Wilkins lab had been the key to DNA structure, died of cancer aged 37 in 1958, and Nobel Prizes are not awarded posthumously. Watson and Crick published the classic double helix model in 1953. The final piece in the jigsaw of DNA structure was produced by Watson with the realization that the pairing of the nucleotide bases, adenine with thymine and guanine with cytosine, not only provided the rungs holding the twisting ladder of DNA together, but also provided a code for accurate replication and a template for protein assembly. Crick continued to study and elucidate the base pairing required for coding proteins, and this led to the fundamental ‘dogma’ that ‘DNA makes RNA and RNA makes protein’. The discovery of DNA structure marked an enormous advance in biology, probably the most significant since Darwin’s publication of On the Origin of Species .

So, Rosalind became a symbol, first of an argumentative swot, then of a downtrodden woman scientist, and finally of a triumphant heroine in a man's world. She was none of these things and would have hated all of them. She was simply a very good scientist with an ambition, as she told Colin from her hospital bed, to be a Fellow of the Royal Society before she was 40. But she died at thirty-seven.

Your faith rests on the future of yourself and others as individuals, mine in the future and fate of our successors. It seems to me that yours is the more selfish

But if one is going to create characters, I suggest that one is well-advised not to attach to them the names of real persons, living or dead.

She had a capacity for tact, but she was also extremely honest, and if tact and honesty conflicted on any important matter, the honesty won.

In science, even more than elsewhere, to suppress a truth is to consent to a lie.

But one consequence of learning anything new is that one usually learns more than anticipated.

I have yet to find, anyway, that those who urge the broad, philosophical view with respect to the work of others are quite so broad or philosophical when it comes to the correct attribution of their own productions.

The general notion of raising the status of women was never more than peripheral to Rosalind, and on the whole it irritated her for its imprecision.

WE MAY TALK ABOUT WATSON AND CRICK’S DOUBLE-HELIX DISCOVERY IN SCIENCE CLASS, BUT BRITISH CHEMIST ROSALIND FRANKLIN IS THE ONE WHO REVEALED DNA’S STRUCTURE.

The church of medicine has its own saintly patrons, the most prominent being Hypocrites who founded a new religion and its sacred oath and originated a new era of humanity. Then comes Paracelsus, the father of toxicology, who promoted herbal medicine, iatrochemistry and pharmacognosy. Next, Pasteur, the father of vaccines, who, like Moses, shepherded humanity away from the captivity of infectious diseases, led it towards the promised land of health and provided it with the tools for its salvation 8 (Clerc 2004: 7). There is Freud who founded a new sect within medicine— psychoanalysis (Cioffi 1998 [2010]; Rieff 1973) while Watson and Crick revealed to humanity the sacred mystery of life. Among these saints there are also martyrs, like the promoter of jogging Jim Fixx, who died of heart attack while running, or Rosalind Franklin, who died of cancer caused by her exposure to X-ray radiation.

Rosalind Franklin. She was instrumental in discovering the double helix in DNA, but it was two male colleagues, Crick and Watson, that got the Nobel Prize.

There you have it. He is resentful that a woman is succeeding where he failed, and most likely, he will either continue to encroach on your territory or try to take credit for your work. Be careful.

It is in these moments that I wonder--despite my love of and commitment to science--if I have chosen the right track. Should I be following the long-established path carved out for me by my family, a path stolen from so many Jewish women and men by the Nazis during the past, horrible war? Do I owe it to them to carry on the Franklin traditions in their name?

Some tragedy is always implied when human beings can in no way communicate; what happened at King's is only a special example of it.

France is not England, and nowhere do they differ more than in their attitude towards intellectuals, toward women, and toward those who happen to be both.

Talk is essential, talk stimulates, arguments clarify, speculations which are thrown out to the winds may fall like seed to spring up with a crop of perceptions.

There is no real parallel to this in science, which abhors error, and which concerns matters in which naïveté cannot be distinguished from ignorance.

Absurdities exasperated her. At the same time, the slow process of patiently leading recalcitrant thinkers to better thoughts by artful persuasions seemed to her a waste of time--a logical argument, cogently expressed, was surely sufficient to convince, and if it did not convince, then the case might well be hopeless and not worth pursuing.

When an atmosphere grows thick enough with justifications, explanations, rationalizations, postures, and regrets, not to omit occasional hostilities, untruth disappears just as surely as truth does.

Those who are reserved by nature, and who rarely make friends quickly, or lightly, have a natural reluctance to say good-by, if only because new relationships will not quickly, or lightly, replace the ones that are left behind.

The notion that accurate statements made by a woman scientist are first to be regarded as likely outpourings of feminism, and only under the strong pressure of irrefutable demonstration as science is Watson's own contribution.

She was not engaging in any broad or sweeping challenge when she insisted that her own status be acknowledged as not only "equal" to that of any comparable male scientist, but to be quite indistinguishable as well, because to her the emphasis was solely upon scientist, not upon the adjective. She was not declaring war on behalf of women's rights, but demanding on behalf of science that those who served it be judged solely and wholly upon their abilities.

And while each subsequent effort saw steep declines in cost, the price tags were still staggering. Craig Venter, the renegade entrepreneur who had taken on the public genome project in a race to be the first to sequence a human genome, sequenced his own genome at a cost of around $100 million. An anonymous Han Chinese man had been sequenced in 2008 for around $2 million. And James Watson, who shared the Nobel Prize for work with Francis Crick and Maurice Wilkins and who, together with Rosalind Franklin, elucidated the structure of DNA, had his genome sequenced by a group at Baylor College of Medicine in early 2008 for the comparatively modest sum of only $1 million.

Perhaps the most egregious example of this behavior was Watson’s “borrowing” of Rosalind Franklin’s data, without her knowledge, to complete the puzzle.

Now she wondered if any woman could get away with the self-promotion successful science demanded. The rare women she’d heard of who resisted convention or tried to assert themselves—Barbara McClintock, Rosalind Franklin, now apparently Ruth Lehmann—were labeled “difficult.” “Greedy” for expecting to be recognized and rewarded in the same way as men.