A lot of excitement on here about the article in Science summarising the discoveries of @alistairsponsel.bsky.social and Brian Sutton, just published in the Journal of the History of Biology. Some people have asked, so here is what I think they show, and what are the implications:
link.springer.com
COI declaration: I was a referee on the paper (not the magazine piece) and also followed the work pre-submission (I spent a happy day in the King’s archive with Brian Sutton and Alistair Sponsell, who is a pal.) It has been known for decades that Franklin, like everyone, thought the B-form was helical, so the Science headline is an exaggeration. The Sponsell and Sutton article (which you should read!) is a fine piece of archival work that has changed my mind and made story more interesting and complex thus: 1. Franklin was concentrating on the shift of 'dry' A form to the 'wet' B form (and vice versa). This was her prime project, not ‘discovering the double helix’ or even ’the gene'. The creation of the B form sample that gave P49 and P51 was therefore not an accident, as Brenda Maddox suggested in her excellent biography (I followed her in this…) 2. Franklin (or Gosling) had been studying the rather wonky P49 image intensely to obtain measurements, and Franklin then decided to prepare a nice publication-quality image (P51). Who made the image is not known, but Sponsell and Sutton do enough to cast doubt on Gosling’s claim in 2010 or 11 that he made it (which I have repeated). He may have done, but if so it was under Franklin’s instruction (he was her PhD student, and Wilkins' - it was complicated). No more 'in fact Gosling took it'. 3. As the notes/marks on P49 and the production of the publication-quality P51 indicate, Franklin was intensely interested in the B form. She did not ‘put it to one side’ as Maddox said or, as I put it rather crudely in the first edition of CRICK, ‘put it in a drawer’. If she did those things, it was not because she was not interested, but because she turned to the A form, as part of her project on the A-B transition. This was where she hit a problem, for the A form proved far more intractable than she hoped, and the data even led her to decide it was not helical. This was when she made the (in)famous spoof 'death notice' for the helical A form. Note that when Crick later saw an image of the A form, he told Franklin that he was very glad he had not seen it before, as it would have confused him greatly. Had Franklin been able to get a handle on the A form she would surely have returned to the B form in late 1952. These are the excellent insights of Sponsell & Sutton. 4. In early 1953, unable to resolve the A form, Franklin studied the B form and stated that it had 2 or more chains in a helix, and that the sequence of the bases was infinitely variable, thereby enabling the expression of genetic specificity. Like Crick (and probably Watson), it was only when she glimpsed this point that she became focused on the genetic aspect of DNA (this was not clear until after the double helix; experimental proof was initially slight and limited to microbes for over two decades). 5. It still needs saying: Franklin did NOT discover the double helix; no historian says she did. She did not twig that there was complementary base pairing (W&C only realised at the very end), nor did she grasp that the C2 symmetry she had identified suggested that if there were two chains, they went in opposite directions. Crick realised this, but it played no part in the creation of the W&C model because Watson did not appreciate (or probably understand) the point. Franklin later said she could kick herself for not having realised this. 6. P51 (and P49!) played no role in the discovery of the double helix, beyond exciting Watson. Crick never saw either, and the essential information it contained had been sketched out by Wilkins in a letter to Crick on the basis of one of his own (less clear and less stylish) images in April 1952. 7. Watson and Crick did NOT steal Franklin's data and they DID credit her in increasing detail in the *four* articles they wrote in the months after the discovery (see below). They were given access to a report from King's containing a page summary by Franklin, which gave them a framework (size of the two forms) and also (C2) confirmed their structure. If it could have 'given' them the double helix, Franklin would have seen it earlier. They succeeded partly by luck (e.g.unlike Franklin they were told which were the correct form of the bases – had she tried to find base pairing she would have failed) and because they had each other to argue with. Franklin was on her own; that she made such progress is a mark of her ability. 8. The discovery was not the sole work of Watson and Crick, nor was it seen as such at the time. All three groups published back to back in Nature under a common title, and the reprints were bound together. The first public presentation of the double helix took place in June. Look at the authors:
9. Franklin became a good friend of the Cricks', staying with them when she was convalescing, going to their racy parties, staying overnight with them and discussing her results on virus structure with Francis. He planned to recruit her to the LMB in Cambridge. She was also friendly with Watson who strongly supported her grant applications, although they were working on the same topic. She shared data with him and even tried to cadge a lift with him and Brenner across the USA in 1956. She was not cross with them, not because she was ignorant or duped, but because, unlike modern critics she read the articles and knew what they had done (she also knew that Wilkins was friendly with both men and had communicated her findings, expressed in seminars, to them.) Did they act correctly? No. They should have asked her permission to a) study her problem and b) use her data as a framework.
10. If you want to know more about this, a) read the Sponsell and Sutton paper linked at the top, b) read this article, which I wrote with @nccomfort.bsky.social in 2023 and c) read the relevant parts of my 2025 biography, CRICK.
www.nature.com
11. I will not be taking questions.The story of a woman whose data was stolen by two ambitious men who then did not credit her seems to be too powerful to be overcome by mere facts. This is, of course, all Watson's fault because of how he presented events. We are all hoist by his petard. Sponsell and Sutton have helped make things clearer, and are to be congratulated on that. And it is of course SPONSEL with only one L. My apologies @alistairsponsel.bsky.social