Women receive less credit for their contributions to science than do men, just as Rosalind Franklin was denied credit for her role in discovering the structure of DNA—or so says a recent article in Nature. But the authors’ statement about Franklin is false, and their conclusion about women in science is probably no more trustworthy. The portrayal of Franklin as a wronged heroine is a modern myth that will not die, propagated by feminists who hope with claims of discrimination to undermine male dominance of science.
“Franklin’s pivotal contribution to the discovery of the structure of DNA initially went unrecognized, and it was not until long after she died that science realized she was wrongfully denied authorship on the original Crick and Watson paper,” writes a research group led by Julia I. Lane of New York University. In fact Franklin’s contribution was recognized from the start. Watson and Crick, at the conclusion of their discovery paper, wrote: “We have also been stimulated by a knowledge of the general nature of the unpublished experimental results and ideas of Dr.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.” Moreover, Franklin published all her DNA results, in a paper of which she was lead author, in the same issue of Nature as the Watson–Crick paper. In what way was she “initially unrecognized”?
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