![]() ![]() Max Perutz, another Cambridge-based scientist, also passed the model-builders a confidential report, including Franklin's detailed notes and X-ray photographs, which he had received as part of his Medical Research Council duties evaluating the King's unit. Unguardedly, Wilkins showed Franklin's photos to Crick and Watson without her permission. The bones of the argument are these: the Cambridge-based DNA model-builders, Francis Crick and James Watson, needed the collaboration of the King's London-based experimentalists, Maurice Wilkins and Rosalind Franklin, because only experimentalists could provide the crucial X-ray evidence of the helical structure. Its subtitle, "A vivid view of what it is like to be a gifted woman in an especially male profession", made sure of that. Written with the support of many crystallographers outraged by Watson's unprofessional treatment of a colleague, above all one silenced cruelly by premature death, Sayre's biography spoke directly to the rising women's movement. ![]() ![]() It was not just that Watson systematically stereotyped Franklin, making her out to be a bluestocking and a frump, nor that he called her "Rosy" when even to her intimates she was Rosalind, but that this stereotyping enabled him to erase Franklin's crucial contribution of the X-ray photographs that confirmed the helical structure. The immediate provocation was James Watson's hugely popular book, The Double Helix (1968). ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |