Francis Crick's Nobel Medal up for sale

"Francis Crick's Nobel Prize medal to be auctioned"

The family of Francis Crick, one of three men who received the Nobel Prize for discovering DNA structure, announced a plan to auction his 23-carat gold medal. Part of the proceeds are to be offered to research institutions.

by

Wynne Parry

February 26, 2013

The Christian Science Monitor

Sixty years after the discovery of DNA's spiraling, ladder-like structure first hinted at the mechanism by which life copies itself, one of the Nobel Prize medals honoring this achievement is up for sale.

Three men who played crucial roles in deciphering DNA's double helix in 1953 later received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. The family of one of those men, Francis Crick, plans to sell his medal, the accompanying diploma and other items at auction with a portion of the proceeds set to benefit research institutions in the United States and the United Kingdom.

"It had been tucked away for so long," said Kindra Crick, Francis Crick's 36-year-old granddaughter, of the medal. "We really were interested in finding someone who could look after it, and possibly put it on display so it could inspire the next generation of scientists." Francis Crick passed away in 2004 at the age of 88. 

There is little precedent for this sale. Nobel medals appear to have changed hands publicly in only a couple of instances. This particular medal, like others made before 1980, is struck in 23-carat gold, and recognizes a particularly high-profile accomplishment in biology, one fundamental to modern genetics.

The auction house handling the sale, Heritage Auctions, has valued the medal and diploma at $500,000, which is "an educated guestimate," said Sandra Palomino, Heritage Auctions' director of historical manuscripts. Estimates by Heritage's in-house coin experts went as high as $5 million, Palomino said.

The April auction will also include Crick's award check with his endorsement on the back, the scientist's lab coat, his gardening logs, nautical journals and books. Separately, the family hopes to sell a letter Crick wrote in 1953 to his then-12-year-old son Michael, who is Kindra's father, describing the discovery's meaning. The auction house Christies, which Kindra Crick said is handling the sale, declined to confirm plans to sell this letter.

The medal was not displayed much within Crick's family. Kindra remembers that the Nobel, which she has yet to see herself, was locked in a room with her grandfather's other awards and other family heirlooms after he moved to California at the age of 60. After the scientist's wife, Odile, passed away in 2007, the medal was sequestered in a safe deposit box. Crick's children, including Kindra's father, Michael, attended the award ceremony in 1962, but saw almost nothing of the medal afterward.

Kindra plans to get a look at the medal before the auction.

"My grandfather was not the type of personality to show off," she said. "His conversation tended to be on what's next as opposed to reminiscing about the past … I guess he always thought there was more to come."

Crick's family hopes to see the medal displayed publicly after its sale; however, Kindra Crick acknowledged that a public auction offered no guarantee a buyer would display the award. But she is optimistic, saying those individuals or institutions with enough interest in science to bid on the medal are also likely to display it publicly. [Creative Genius: The World's Greatest Minds]

Crick's family and Heritage Auctions plan to donate a portion of the proceeds from the sale of the medal and the other items to The Francis Crick Institute, a medical research institute scheduled to open in London in 2015. A portion of the proceeds from the sale of the letter will go to benefit the Salk Institute in California, where Francis Crick studied consciousness later in his career, Kindra said.

On Feb. 28, 1953, according to legend, Crick and his colleague James Watson announced that they had discovered the "secret of life" in a pub frequented by other Cambridge University scientists.

This followed Watson's realization that the molecular bonds between the two types of base pairs in DNA — adenine with thymine and cytosine with guanine — were identical in shape, suggesting a double helix with complementary halves, Watson recounts in "The Annotated and Illustrated Double Helix" (Simon & Schuster, 2012).

This discovery was the result of a combination of approaches; Watson and Crick built models, trying to determine how the molecules known to make up DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid) fit together. Meanwhile, two of their colleagues, Maurice Wilkins and Rosalind Franklin, created images by bouncing X-rays off DNA crystals.

One of Franklin's images, called Photograph 51, provided key evidence of a helical shape.

Crick, Watson and Wilkins received the Nobel Prize in 1962. Franklin did not because she passed away in 1958, and the Nobel Prize is not awarded posthumously.
Form means function

In the years prior to this discovery, scientists knew of the existence of DNA (a type of molecule known as a nucleic acid), but not what it looked like or its true function. They also knew genes carried traits from generation to generation, but many scientists believed genes to be made of proteins, said Jan Witkowski, executive director of the Banbury Center at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York.

The discovery of the structure of DNA was key to understanding the molecule's function as the code for genes. Watson and Crick understood this, but when they described their discovery in a paper in the journal Nature in April 1953, they wrote coyly of the implications: "It has not escaped our notice that the specific pairing we have postulated immediately suggests a possible copying mechanism for genetic material."

However, in the letter to 12-year-old Michael, dated March 19, 1953, Crick drew a diagram spelling out the scientists' theory of how DNA replicated: the double helix and its base-pair rungs separated to create templates for new strands.

"In other words, we think we have found the basic copying mechanism by which life comes from life," Crick wrote to his son. The scientists signed the letter, which appears in "The Annotated and Illustrated Double Helix," "lots of love, Daddy."

A geneticist himself, Witkowski lists the discovery of the structure of DNA as one of the three most pivotal accomplishments in biology, along with Charles Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection and Gregor Mendel's principles of inheritance. 

"Of course, it wasn't so much what each discovery was in itself, but what avenues it opened up and what it led on to," said Witkowski, who with Alexander Gann, edited the "Annotated and Illustrated Double Helix."

"Francis Crick's Nobel Prize gold medal heading to auction"

by

Paul Gilkes

March 13th, 2013

Coin World

British scientist Dr. Francis Harry Compton Crick’s gold 1962 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine, for co-discovering the structure of DNA, will cross the auction block April 11 in New York City.

The medal, accompanied by Crick’s Nobel diploma and medal presentation case, is one of 11 lots consigned by Crick’s heirs to be included in Heritage Auctions April 10 and 11 Historical Manuscripts Signature Auction.

It is the second Nobel Prize medal to be offered at public auction in six months. The Danish auction house Bruun Rasmussen Auctioneers in November 2012 sold the 1975 Nobel Prize for Physics awarded to Danish physicist Aage Niels Bohr. Bohr was one of three Nobel laureates recognized for Physics. He was the son of Niels Henrik David Bohr, also a 1922 Nobel Prize winning physicist.

The Bohr medal realized 280,000 Danish kroner or the equivalent of about $47,755 in U.S. funds at auction. The Crick medal has an opening bid of $500,000.

The Crick items consigned to the Heritage Auctions sale include Crick’s endorsed Nobel Prize check, dated Dec. 10, 1962, for his one-third share of the prize money, and one of his lab coats.

Also being offered are nautical logbooks, gardening journals and books from Crick’s personal collection.

The sale is being held by Heritage at the Ukrainian Institute of America at The Fletcher-Sinclair Mansion, 2 E. 79th St., New York.

A portion of the proceeds from the sale of the consigned Crick items will be used to promote scientific research at the new Francis Crick Institute in London, set to be completed in 2015.

Recipients

Dr. Crick and two of his fellow researchers — Dr. James Dewey Watson and Dr. Maurice Hugh Frederick Wilkins — received their medals from the hand of King Gustav VI Adolf of Sweden at the Stockholm Concert Hall on Dec. 10, 1962.

Rosalind Franklin, who also contributed to the DNA discovery, died in 1958 before the Nobel was awarded. It is not awarded posthumously.

“The whole family went to the grand ceremony in Stockholm where the Nobel Prizes were awarded by the King of Sweden,” said Michael Crick, Dr. Crick’s son, continuing, “My Dad dressed for the occasion, gave a speech and danced with my sister, Gabrielle. It was a great honor to be there.”

After receiving the medal, however, Dr. Crick — never one to rest on his laurels — went right back to work, Michael Crick said of his father.

“We know he deeply appreciated the recognition by his peers,” Michael Crick said, “but he did not talk much about winning the medal after the event. That was the thing about my Dad; he was a very focused scientist and after DNA he went on to work on the mechanism of protein synthesis, deciphering the three-letter nature of the genetic code and determining the origins of life on earth. He was a driven scientist his whole life.

“At 60, he turned his attention to theoretical neurobiology and for the next 28 years helped advance the study of human consciousness.”

The medal

Dr. Crick’s medal has been secured in a safe deposit box in California since Dr. Crick’s widow, Odile, passed away July 5, 2007, according to Heritage officials. Dr. Crick died July 28, 2004, in San Diego, Calif.

Dr. Crick’s medal is one of the three Nobel Prize medals presented to the researchers “for their discoveries concerning the molecular structure of nucleic acids and its significance for information transfer in living material,” according to Nobelprize.org, the official Nobel Prize website. It was a discovery that launched a scientific revolution and forever changed man’s understanding of life, according to the website.

Designed by Swedish artist Erik Lindberg, the 65-millimeter medal weighs 198.6 grams.

Struck in 23-karat gold, the obverse features a side portrait of Alfred Nobel with the dates of his birth and death in Roman numerals. The reverse “ ... represents the Genius of Medicine holding an open book in her lap, collecting the water pouring out from a rock in order to quench a sick girl’s thirst,” according to the auction lot description.

An inscription appears above the figures, reading: INVENTAS VITAM JUVAT EXCOLUISSE PER ARTES. Taken from the sixth song, verse 663, of Virgil’s Aeneid, it is translated as “Inventions Enhance Life Which Is Beautified Through Art.”

The lower outside section of the medal bears a second inscription, REG. UNIVERSITAS MED. CHIR. CAROL (“The Karolinska Institutet”).

The Nobel Assembly at the Karolinska Institutet, a medical university in Europe, is responsible for choosing the laureates for the award for Physiology or Medicine.

Dr. Crick’s initials and surname are engraved on the reverse of his Nobel Prize medal, along with the year of the prize, 1962, presented in Roman numerals: F. H. C. CRICK/MCMLXII. The second piece of the prize, the Nobel diploma — on two vellum pages, 9.5 inches by 13.5 inches, handwritten in Swedish, dated Stockholm, October 18, 1962 — is also included.

Anniversary of discovery

“This year marks the 60th anniversary of the historic discovery of the structure of DNA and 50 years have passed since Francis Crick was awarded the Nobel Prize,” said Kindra Crick, Dr. Crick’s granddaughter. “For most of that time, the Nobel Prize and the unique personal diploma have been locked up. By auctioning his Nobel, it will finally be made available for public display and be well looked after. Our hope is that, by having it available for display, it can be an inspiration to the next generation of scientists.”

From Nobelprize.org...

Francis Harry Compton Crick was born on June 8th, 1916, at Northampton, England, being the elder child of Harry Crick and Annie Elizabeth Wilkins. He has one brother, A. F. Crick, who is a doctor in New Zealand.

Crick was educated at Northampton Grammar School and Mill Hill School, London. He studied physics at University College, London, obtained a B.Sc. in 1937, and started research for a Ph.D. under Prof E. N. da C. Andrade, but this was interrupted by the outbreak of war in 1939. During the war he worked as a scientist for the British Admiralty, mainly in connection with magnetic and acoustic mines. He left the Admiralty in 1947 to study biology.

Supported by a studentship from the Medical Research Council and with some financial help from his family, Crick went to Cambridge and worked at the Strangeways Research Laboratory. In 1949 he joined the Medical Research Council Unit headed by M. F. Perutz of which he has been a member ever since. This Unit was for many years housed in the Cavendish Laboratory Cambridge, but in 1962 moved into a large new building - the Medical Research Council Laboratory of Molecular Biology - on the New Hospital site. He became a research student for the second time in 1950, being accepted as a member of Caius College, Cambridge, and obtained a Ph.D. in 1954 on a thesis entitled «X-ray diffraction: polypeptides and proteins».

During the academic year 1953-1954 Crick was on leave of absence at the Protein Structure Project of the Brooklyn Polytechnic in Brooklyn, New York. He has also lectured at Harvard, as a Visiting Professor, on two occasions, and has visited other laboratories in the States for short periods.

In 1947 Crick knew no biology and practically no organic chemistry or crystallography, so that much of the next few years was spent in learning the elements of these subjects. During this period, together with W. Cochran and V. Vand he worked out the general theory of X-ray diffraction by a helix, and at the same time as L. Pauling and R. B. Corey, suggested that the alpha-keratin pattern was due to alpha-helices coiled round each other.

A critical influence in Crick's career was his friendship, beginning in 1951, with J. D. Watson, then a young man of 23, leading in 1953 to the proposal of the double-helical structure for DNA and the replication scheme. Crick and Watson subsequently suggested a general theory for the structure of small viruses.

Crick in collaboration with A. Rich has proposed structures for polyglycine II and collagen and (with A. Rich, D. R. Davies, and J. D.Watson) a structure for polyadenylic acid.

In recent years Crick, in collaboration with S. Brenner, has concentrated more on biochemistry and genetics leading to ideas about protein synthesis (the «adaptor hypothesis»), and the genetic code, and in particular to work on acridine-type mutants.

Crick was made an F.R.S. in 1959. He was awarded the Prix Charles Leopold Meyer of the French Academy of Sciences in 1961, and the Award of Merit of the Gairdner Foundation in 1962. Together with J. D. Watson he was a Warren Triennial Prize Lecturer in 1959 and received a Research Corporation Award in 1962. With J. D. Watson and M. H. F. Wilkins he was presented with a Lasker Foundation Award in 1960. In 1962 he was elected a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a Fellow of University College, London. He was a Fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge, in 1960-1961, and is now a non-resident Fellow of the Salk Institute for Biological Studies, San Diego, California.

In 1940 Crick married Ruth Doreen Dodd. Their son, Michael F. C. Crick is a scientist. They were divorced in 1947. In 1949 Crick married Odile Speed. They have two daughters, Gabrielle A. Crick and Jacqueline M. T. Crick. The family lives in a house appropriately called «The Golden Helix», in which Crick likes to find his recreation in conversation with his friends.

Rosalind Franklin--Double Helix

Rosalind Franklin

I will say that wrongs will be righted and gender and ethnicity will finally dissolve in the sciences.

"Rosalind Franklin and the Double Helix"

Although she made essential contributions toward elucidating the structure of DNA, Rosalind Franklin is known to many only as seen through the distorting lens of James Watson's book, The Double Helix.

by

Lynne Osman Elkin

February 2003

American Institute of Physics

In 1962, James Watson, then at Harvard University, and Cambridge University's Francis Crick stood next to Maurice Wilkins from King's College, London, to receive the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for their "discoveries concerning the molecular structure of nucleic acids and its significance for information transfer in living material." Watson and Crick could not have proposed their celebrated structure for DNA as early in 1953 as they did without access to experimental results obtained by King's College scientist Rosalind Franklin. Franklin had died of cancer in 1958 at age 37, and so was ineligible to share the honor. Her conspicuous absence from the awards ceremony--the dramatic culmination of the struggle to determine the structure of DNA--probably contributed to the neglect, for several decades, of Franklin's role in the DNA story. She most likely never knew how significantly her data influenced Watson and Crick's proposal.

The Tuscan landscape forms the background of this photograph of Rosalind Franklin, taken in the spring of 1950 by her friend Vittorio Luzzati. (Courtesy of Vittorio Luzzati.)

Franklin was born 25 July 1920 to Muriel Waley Franklin and merchant banker Ellis Franklin, both members of educated and socially conscious Jewish families. They were a close immediate family, prone to lively discussion and vigorous debates at which the politically liberal, logical, and determined Rosalind excelled: She would even argue with her assertive, conservative father. Early in life, Rosalind manifested the creativity and drive characteristic of the Franklin women, and some of the Waley women, who were expected to focus their education, talents, and skills on political, educational, and charitable forms of community service. It was thus surprising when young Rosalind expressed an early fascination with physics and chemistry classes at the academically rigorous St. Paul's Girls' School in London, and unusual that she earned a bachelor's degree in natural sciences with a specialty in physical chemistry. The degree was earned at Newnham College, Cambridge in 1941.

Coffee served in crucibles was a tradition in Jacques Mering's Paris laboratory, where Rosalind Franklin worked from 1947 to 1950. Biographer Anne Sayre reports that the time Franklin spent working in Paris was the happiest period of her life. This candid photo was taken by Vittorio Luzzati. (Courtesy of Vittorio Luzzati.)

From 1942 to 1946, Franklin did war-related graduate work with the British Coal Utilization Research Association. That work earned her a PhD from Cambridge in 1945, and an offer to join the Laboratoire Central des Services Chimiques de l'Etat in Paris. She worked there, from 1947 to 1950, with Jacques Mering and became proficient at applying x-ray diffraction techniques to imperfectly crystalline matter such as coal. In the period 1946­49, she published five landmark coal-related papers, still cited today, on graphitizing and nongraphitizing carbons. By 1957, she had published an additional dozen articles on carbons other than coals. Her papers changed the way physical chemists view the microstructure of coals and related substances.

Franklin made many friends in the Paris laboratory and often hiked with them on weekends. She preferred to live on her own modest salary and frustrated her parents by continually refusing to accept money from them. She excelled at speaking French and at French cooking and soon became more comfortable with intellectual and egalitarian "French ways" than with conventional English middle-class customs. Consequently, she did not fit in well at King's College, where she worked on DNA from 1951 to 1953. Franklin chose to leave King's and, in the spring of 1953, moved to Birkbeck College. Many of the students there were evening students who worked during the day, and Franklin was impressed with their dedication. After the move to Birkbeck, she began her celebrated work with J. Desmond Bernal on RNA viruses like tobacco mosaic virus (TMV). She was a cautious scientist who began to trust her intuition more as she matured (see box 1 on page 45). She published 14 papers about viruses between 1955 and 1958, and completed the research for three others that colleague Aaron Klug submitted for publication after her death.

In his obituary for Franklin, Bernal described her as a "recognized authority in industrial physico-chemistry." In conclusion, he wrote, "As a scientist, Miss Franklin was distinguished by extreme clarity and perfection in everything she undertook. Her photographs are among the most beautiful of any substances ever taken."1

Discovery of two forms for DNA

Franklin's most famous and controversial work yielded critical data that Watson and Crick used to determine DNA's structure. DNA is a double-helical molecule roughly in the form of a spiral staircase. The double-helical molecule, consisting of two unbranched polynucleotide chains, is best visualized by imagining it straightened into a ladder. The side rails of the ladder are each made up of alternating sugar and phosphate groups, linked by so-called 3' or 5' phosphodiester bonds. The sequence of the atoms in each rail runs in opposite directions, so the two sides of the molecular backbone are often described as antiparallel to each other. The rungs of the ladder consist of specific hydrogen-bonded horizontal pairs of nitrogenous bases that are attached to the deoxyribose sugars in the backbone's side rails. Birkbeck's Sven Furberg, who studied both the nucleoside and nucleotide of one of the bases, cytosine, in 1949, discovered that the base would be perpendicular to the sugar: The result can be extrapolated to hydrated DNA.2

The pairs of nitrogenous bases that make up the rungs are in the keto, as opposed to enol, tautomeric configurations. (The two are distinguished by the locations of hydrogen atoms available for hydrogen bonding.) The smaller single-ringed pyrimidines, cytosine (C) and thymine (T), are always paired with larger double-ringed purines, guanine (G) and adenine (A). Indeed, the consistent pairing of G with C and of A with T, as first proposed by Watson, explains the identical size of the ladder rungs and also Erwin Chargaff's 1952 observation that G and C (and likewise A and T) are always present in DNA in approximately equal amounts. The consistent pairings, along with the irregular linear vertical sequence of the bases, underlie DNA's genetic capacity.

In an experiment carried out shortly after she arrived at King's, Franklin identified two distinct configurations, called by her the A and B forms, in which DNA could exist. Her work, first presented in an internal King's seminar in November 1951 and published in Nature in 1953, was essential for determining the structure of DNA. Researchers working prior to Franklin's discovery invariably had to deal with confusing x-ray diffraction patterns that resulted from a mixture of the A and B forms.

The drier crystalline A form contains about 20% water by weight and is optimally produced at about 75% relative humidity. Cation (for example, Na+) bridges between ionized phosphates are probably responsible for intermolecular linking in the crystalline structure. The less ordered, fully hydrated, paracrystalline B form--typically the configuration that occurs in vivo--is obtained from the crystalline A form when DNA fibers absorb water in excess of 40% of their weight. Optimal production of the B form occurs at approximately 90% relative humidity. Extra hydration makes it easier for the molecule to assume the lowest-energy, helical configuration. It also keeps the two helical backbone chains farther apart than in the A form and elongates the molecule by about 30% until the B form appears with its bases oriented perpendicular to the fiber axis.

Franklin slowly and precisely hydrated then dehydrated her DNA sample to obtain her best pictures of the A form. To get her samples, though, she had to extract DNA fibers from a gel-like undenatured DNA sample that Wilkins had acquired from Rudolf Signer of the University of Berne in Switzerland. Franklin pulled exceptionally thin single fibers and controlled the humidity in her specimen chamber by bubbling hydrogen gas through salt solutions and then flooding the chamber with the humid gas that resulted. Franklin's PhD student, Raymond Gosling, told me that the chamber leaked so much hydrogen gas that he was afraid they would blow themselves up accidentally and take half of King's College with them.

Franklin's careful treatment during the transformation from crystalline A-form to hydrated B-form DNA resulted in such a drastic size change that, according to Gosling, the elongating specimen practically "leaped off the stage." After designing a tilting microfocus camera and developing a technique for improving the orientation of her DNA fibers in the camera's collimated beam, Franklin took x-ray diffraction photographs of the B form.

Franklin's B-form data, in conjunction with cylindrical Patterson map calculations that she had applied to her A-form data, allowed her to determine DNA's density, unit-cell size, and water content. With those data, Franklin proposed a double-helix structure with precise measurements for the diameter, the separation between each of the coaxial fibers along the fiber axis direction, and the pitch of the helix.3

The diffraction photograph of the B form of DNA taken by Rosalind Franklin in May 1952 was by far the best photograph of its kind. Data derived from this photograph were instrumental in allowing James Watson and Francis Crick to construct their Nobel Prize­winning model for DNA. (Courtesy of the Norman Collection on the History of Molecular Biology in Novato, Calif.)

The resolution of the B-form photograph #51 shown in figure 3 allowed Franklin to determine that each turn of the helix in the B form is 34 Å long and contains 10 base pairs separated by 3.4 Å each,3 in accordance with less precise data obtained by William Astbury and Florence Bell in 1938.4 Wilkins, photographing living sperm cells in 1952, obtained an X-shaped B-form diffraction pattern similar to Franklin's. Her photograph, though, showed much more detail.

Additional contributions

The cylindrical Patterson map calculations that Franklin applied to the A-form of DNA were the first such calculations applied to any molecule. They confirmed her suggestions that the hydrophilic sugar phosphates form the external backbone of the DNA molecule and that the hydrophobic base pairs are protected inside that backbone from the cell's aqueous environment. The calculations also allowed her to deduce that the A-form helix has two antiparallel chains (see figure 4d). With Gosling, Franklin provided details of the physical distortion accompanying the dehydration transformation from B-form to A-form DNA.5 She also showed that the bases of the A form are tilted and curved slightly, and that 11 pairs of bases are compacted within a repeat distance of 28.1 Å.

Notebook entries show that Rosalind Franklin (a) recognized that the B form of DNA was likely to have a two-chained helix; (b) was aware of the Chargaff ratios; (c) knew that most, if not all, of the nitrogenous bases in DNA were in the keto configuration (my circles indicate the hydrogen positions that distinguish the keto from the enol form); and (d) determined that the backbone chains of A-form DNA are antiparallel. (Courtesy of Anne Sayre and Jenifer Franklin Glynn.

In her section of the 1952 King's Medical Research Council (MRC) report, Franklin gave quantitative measurements for the interphosphate distances and discussed the external placement of the phosphates. Her presentation was instrumental in getting Watson and Crick to abandon their earlier attempts at placing the bases on the outside of their model. Initially, they (and Linus Pauling, too) mistakenly thought that the bases would have to be externally accessible in order to pass genetic information.

In May 1952, Franklin presented her clearest evidence of the helical backbone, with her diffraction photograph #51. Although she did not yet realize how the nitrogenous bases are paired or that the helical backbone rails of B-form DNA are antiparallel, her notebook entries starting in January 1951 clearly show that she was making significant progress toward solving those two final aspects of DNA structure. After reading an article by June Broomhead,6 and studying other related papers, she had used the keto configuration for at least three of the four bases. She was aware both of Jerry Donohue's work concerning tautomeric forms of bases and of Chargaff's work (see figure above).

Astbury and Bell's earlier, less clear diffraction photographs and later data of Wilkins suggested some of the data that Franklin derived from her photograph #51. But Franklin's results were much more precise than the Astbury and Bell data, which showed neither an X pattern nor layer lines. Astbury and Bell themselves described their results as "still rather obscure." After Oxford crystallographer Dorothy Hodgkin helped her to eliminate two of three possibilities she had calculated, Franklin described the correct crystallographic space group for DNA in the 1952 MRC report.

Only after Crick obtained Franklin's data--his thesis adviser, Max Perutz, agreed to give him a copy of the 1952 report and Watson had seen photograph #51--was he sufficiently convinced to start constructing the backbone of the successful DNA model. He recognized the similarity of the space group Franklin had calculated to that of his thesis molecule, hemoglobin, and immediately deduced that there would be an antiparallel orientation between the two DNA coaxial fibers. Within one week, he started modeling the correct backbone in a manner compatible with Franklin's data. On several occasions, Crick has acknowledged that the data and conclusions in the 1952 report were essential.

Franklin's 17 March 1953 draft

On 18 March 1953, Wilkins penned a letter acknowledging receipt of the Watson and Crick manuscript that described the structure of DNA. A day earlier, Franklin, who was preparing to leave for Birkbeck, polished an already written draft manuscript outlining her conclusions about the double-helix backbone chain of B-form DNA.7 Franklin only slightly modified her draft to prepare her April 1953 Nature paper, which appeared as the third in a series that led off with the famous Watson and Crick proposal. Partly as a consequence of its placement, Franklin's paper seemed merely to support Watson and Crick's work. But Franklin's data played far more than just a supporting role--as early as 1968, Watson's The Double Helix tells us so.

Ironically, despite its negative portrayal of Franklin, The Double Helix was what first brought widespread attention to Franklin's key contributions to the Watson and Crick proposal. The book describes how Watson and Crick built their first, and incorrect, model right after Watson inaccurately reported Franklin's November 1951 seminar data to Crick. It also details how, after 13 months of inactivity, they built their correct model once Wilkins showed Franklin's photograph #51 to Watson, and Perutz showed Crick the 1952 MRC report.

The importance of Franklin's work to the discovery of DNA structure has not been well documented until recently for a variety of reasons too long to discuss here. Relevant issues include women's being underrepresented in historical accounts, although several authors have striven to correct that imbalance;8 Watson and Crick's routinely citing the more senior Wilkins before Franklin; and Wilkins's repeating much of Franklin's work. In addition, Wilkins, not Franklin, was nominated for membership in the Royal Society even though, at the time of his nomination, Franklin was famous for her TMV accomplishments.

Conflict within the King's MRC

Franklin was an outstanding and accomplished scientist--a fascinating individual with a strong personality who made a lasting impression on almost everyone she met. Throughout her career, she routinely ate lunch amicably with both male and female colleagues and most of her acquaintances liked her. Her numerous lifelong friends thought her bright, fascinating, witty, and fun. Most of her lunchtime colleagues at King's would agree with that description, but only as it pertained to her lunchtime persona. When Rosalind headed for the laboratory, she shed almost every vestige of lightheartedness as she focused exclusively on her work.

Furthermore, in what amounted almost to social heresy in England, en route to her laboratory she typically bypassed the morning coffeepot and afternoon tea in favor of a direct assault on her work. Franklin was considered by King's colleagues to be "too French" in her dress, in her intellectual interests, and in her temperament. She was exceedingly direct, intent, and serious, with the tendency to leap into passionate debate. She could be assertive, uniquely stubborn, argumentative, and abrasive to the point that colleagues, especially Wilkins, sometimes found her unpleasant.

The Helix Funeral Invitation

Maurice Wilkins insisted that DNA was helical before there was clear evidence. That greatly annoyed Rosalind Franklin, as did so many things about him. Franklin was well aware that the x-ray diffraction photographs of the A form, unlike those of the B form, lacked the clear X-shaped pattern indicative of a helix. Instead, they displayed a detailed and confusing assortment of reflections that she could only interpret through the complicated and daunting procedure of cylindrical Patterson analysis. Therefore, when, over a period of about five months starting on 18 April 1952, Franklin recorded some misleading, apparently asymmetrical double orientation data in the A form, she got perverse pleasure out of possibly annoying Wilkins with her result. As a joke, she penned the "death of the helix" funeral invitation reproduced here. That she wrote the invitation is clearly substantiated in interviews with Raymond Gosling and Wilkins and in many other professional accounts.

The extent and significance of the distribution of the invitation is another matter. During interviews, only diffraction expert Alec Stokes said that he had received one. A few people said that they saw an invitation posted on a bulletin board, and most said that they had never even seen one. That testimony is incompatible with the often repeated claim that a multitude of these cards were sent out.

Historians Horace Judson and Robert Olby argued that the invitation indicated Franklin was antihelical, although Olby notes it was a joke as well.10,11 To the contrary: Franklin's student Raymond Gosling is adamant that Franklin considered the B form, with its striking x-ray pattern, to be helical. Examinations of Franklin's notebooks have led to the same conclusion, although it is also clear that, for a while, Franklin definitely had her doubts about the helicity of the A form.

On the rare occasions when Franklin departed from her typical behavior, King's colleagues usually did not even notice--they took her seriously at all times. That became especially important when she created a "death of the helix" funeral invitation as a joke after obtaining some data indicating that A-form DNA is nonhelical (see above).

Whereas Franklin was quick, intense, assertive, and directly confrontational, Wilkins was exceedingly shy, indirect, and slowly calculating to the point of appearing plodding. Almost all testimony from King's staff indicates that any blame for their perpetual conflict needs to be shared. John Randall, director of the MRC, also deserves some share of the blame. Without informing Wilkins, he wrote a letter to Franklin assigning DNA structural studies to her. He also did not warn Franklin about Wilkins's continuing interest in DNA.

Randall and Wilkins did make some important accommodations for Franklin. They hired her into a senior position based on her expertise. They gave her an excellent laboratory, the highest quality DNA, and a decent budget. However, numerous MRC women, although very well treated for that era, did not receive precisely equal treatment with men. Taken as a whole, the King's MRC women did not rank quite as highly as the men. Also, Gosling told me that women were not allowed upstairs for after-lunch coffee in the smoking room, "a wonderful long room," he explained, "with window seats." That exclusion undoubtedly cut off a natural route for easy scientific conversation.

Franklin's tenure at the MRC ended on an unfortunate note. As a condition to agreeing to transfer her fellowship to Birkbeck, Randall made Franklin promise not to perform additional experiments on DNA, or even to think about DNA. Moreover, Franklin was forced to leave her diffraction photograph behind at King's and to leave the work of confirming DNA's structure to Wilkins. Personality conflicts were the major source of Franklin's difficulty at King's, and her status as a woman may have made her problems worse. Even today, I and many of my women colleagues find that forcefully aggressive behavior, for example, is usually considered merely irritating when exhibited by a man but is often deemed unacceptable when demonstrated by a woman.

Watson's view: The Double Helix

In The Double Helix, Watson bases his account of Franklin on recollections of their three brief meetings between 1951 and 1953, and on repeated complaints about her from Wilkins. The "Rosy" that Watson describes is a caricature based on the more difficult aspects of Franklin's personality. His portrayal--a far cry from the competent scientist described by her colleagues or the fascinating person described by her friends--is an effective device for promoting the idea that Watson and Crick had to rescue DNA data from--as Watson's book puts it--this "belligerent" woman who could not "keep her emotions under control" and who did not know how to interpret her own data. Watson falsely depicts Franklin as Wilkins's assistant, incapable and unworthy of Nobel Prize­caliber work. His book was published against the vehement protest of key DNA participants, who were upset about its numerous inaccuracies.9

Unfortunately, Watson's admittedly fascinating, irreverent, and concise book has sold millions of copies and is for many, especially in the US, the primary source of information about DNA history. That such a one-sided account both is presented as historical fact and has had tremendous influence is worrisome. Watson's treatment of Franklin, who was then deceased and not protected by libel laws, is especially troublesome.

Watson's depiction of Franklin went largely unchallenged, at least in print, until Anne Sayre published her 1975 biography Rosalind Franklin and DNA (W. W. Norton, 1975). Sayre asked awkward, science-related questions: Why would Franklin give her data to Watson, Crick, and Wilkins, three scientists who seemed to have nothing to offer in return at that time? Where would Watson and Crick be without Franklin's results? Why did they not acknowledge Franklin's contributions clearly and appropriately? Regrettably, Sayre's influence was diminished because she was misled about the conditions for women at the MRC. She mistakenly assumed those conditions to be as problematic as they were at the rest of King's, and therefore incorrectly interpreted Franklin's problems at King's in terms of gender issues. Subsequent accounts, though in many ways excellent, typically are dismissive of gender concerns10 and personality issues.11 They don't address the awkward questions Sayre raises nor do they sufficiently emphasize that the Watson and Crick model was made possible by Franklin's data. Fortunately, Brenda Maddox's outstanding and comprehensive 2002 biography of Franklin12 does consider questions of acknowledgment and corrects misconceptions about gender and personality issues. Perhaps it will educate the public more fully than have previous texts. (See Physics Today, February 2003, page 61, for a review of Maddox's book.)

Inadequate acknowledgment

In their 1953 paper, Watson and Crick state that they had been "stimulated by a knowledge of the general nature of the unpublished experimental results and ideas of Dr. M. H. F. Wilkins, Dr. R. E. Franklin and their co-workers at King's College, London." That oblique acknowledgment misrepresented Franklin's role and, whatever its intention, left most people with the impression that her work mainly served to confirm that of Watson and Crick. It has to be one of the greatest understatements in the history of scientific writing.

Given her temper, it is likely that Franklin would have been very angry if she had known the extent to which Watson and Crick used her data. In a 1951 incident, Franklin was furious that a conference acquaintance planned on publishing an idea of hers without giving proper acknowledgment. She shocked him by the tone of her letter in which she demanded coauthorship.

In 1954, Crick and Watson published a detailed methods paper in the Proceedings of the Royal Society. In that paper, their acknowledgment of Franklin is often ambiguous. Three of the four times they mention the importance of her data, they link it with mention of Wilkins's data first in a way that suggests the two scientists' contributions were of equal importance. Twice they follow what appears to be a clear acknowledgment of Franklin's contributions with a recanting qualifying statement, for example, "we should at the same time mention that the details of [the King's College's] X-ray photographs were not shown to us and that the formulation of the structure was largely the result of extensive model building in which the main effort was to find any structure which was stereochemically feasible." They might not have known all of the details, but they had access to a significant number of them (see above).

Another lost opportunity for acknowledging Franklin occurred during the 1962 Nobel Prize ceremony. Neither Watson nor Crick thanked Franklin for making their discovery possible. Indeed, neither mentioned her name, although, according to Wilkins, Crick did ask him to mention Franklin. That request was a dubious shifting of responsibility given Wilkins's antipathy toward Franklin, and Wilkins in fact made only minor mention of her. Crick spoke on the genetic code, which had nothing to do with Franklin's work. Watson spoke on RNA, including RNA viruses. Franklin was an expert on those viruses, yet, in his 59 citations, Watson managed to omit any reference to her work. To this day, Watson emphasizes the opinion that Franklin, although a gifted experimentalist, could not properly interpret all of her own DNA data.

Franklin is prominent in virtually every telling of DNA history, but she is painted differently in various accounts. Watson and Crick made one of the most important and impressive scientific discoveries of the 20th century, but their golden helix is tarnished by the way they have treated Franklin and Wilkins. A meaningful gesture, given that it was Franklin's data that Watson and Crick most directly used, would be for scientists to refer to the "Watson, Crick, and Franklin structure for DNA."

It is important to stop demeaning Franklin's reputation, but equally important to avoid obscuring her more difficult personality traits. She should not be put on a pedestal as a symbol of the unfair treatment accorded to many women in science. Her complicated relationship with Wilkins has been treated in overly simplistic ways. Distorted accounts, which inaccurately portray the three Nobel Prize winners as well as Franklin, are unfortunate and unnecessary: There was enough glory in the work of the four to be shared by them all.


I thank Barbara Low, Mary Singleton, Martha Breed, Marilyn Goldfeather, and Paulina Miner for their many helpful editorial suggestions, and Richard Hasbrouck for his assistance in preparing figures.

Lynne Elkin is a professor of biological sciences at California State University, Hayward. She welcomes responses and inquiries about issues pertaining to the story of Rosalind Franklin and DNA structure.

References

1. J. D. Bernal, Nature 182, 154 (1958).

2. S. Furberg, Acta Crystallogr. 3, 325 (1950); Acta Chem. Scand. 6, 634 (1952).

3. These figures are quoted in Franklin's 1952 Medical Research Council report and her unpublished 17 March 1953 draft paper. The draft was discovered many years later and written about by A. Klug in Nature 219, 808 (1968); 219, 843 (1968); 248, 787 (1974).

4. W. T. Astbury, F. O. Bell, Nature 141, 747 (1938); Cold Spring Harb. Symp. Quant. Biol. 6, 112 (1938).

5. R. E. Franklin, R. G. Gosling, Acta Crystallogr. 6, 673 (1953); 6, 678 (1953).

6. J. Broomhead, Acta Crystallogr. 4, 92 (1951).

7. A. Klug, Nature 219, 808 (1968); 219, 843 (1968); 248, 787 (1974).

8. M. Bailey, American Women in Science: A Biographical Dictionary, ABC-CLIO, Santa Barbara, Calif. (1994); G. Kass-Simon, P. Farnes, eds., Women of Science: Righting the Record Indiana U. Press, Bloomington, Ind. (1990); M. B. Ogilvie, Women in Science: Antiquity Through the Nineteenth Century. A Biographical Dictionary With Annotated Bibliography, MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass. (1986); M. W. Rossiter, Women Scientists in America: Struggles and Strategies to 1940, Johns Hopkins U. Press, Baltimore, Md. (1982); M. W. Rossiter, Women Scientists in America: Before Affirmative Action, 1940­1972, Johns Hopkins U. Press, Baltimore, Md. (1995).

9. See for example, W. Sullivan in J. D. Watson's The Double Helix: A Personal Account of the Discovery of the Structure of DNA, Norton Critical Edition, G. S. Stent, ed., W. W. Norton, New York (1980). Copies of original letters are in the Norman Collection on the History of Molecular Biology in Novato, Calif.

10. F. H. Portugal, J. S. Cohen, A Century of DNA: A History of the Discovery of the Structure and Function of the Genetic Substance, MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass. (1977); H. F. Judson, The Eighth Day of Creation: Makers of the Revolution in Biology, CSHL Press, Plainview, N.Y. (1996).

11. R. C. Olby, The Path to the Double Helix: The Discovery of DNA, Dover, New York (1994).

12. B. Maddox, Rosalind Franklin: The Dark Lady of DNA, HarperCollins, New York (2002).

13. The original letter is in the Anne Sayre Collection of the Microbiological Society Archives at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. See also ref. 12.

14. The original 5 March 1976 letter is in the Anne Sayre Collection of the Microbiological Society Archives at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. See also ref. 12.

15. H. R. Wilson, Trends Biochem. Sci. 13, 275 (1988).