Do we like Rosalind Franklin?
Our score: 8 out of 10. Nothing harmful turned up and her work was exceptional, but the record on how she treated people is thin and she could be sharp.
Rosalind Franklin was born in London in 1920 into a wealthy, influential family. She knew at 15 that she wanted to be a scientist, went to North London Collegiate School, then Newnham College, Cambridge, in 1938. That's a long way from the lab-coat-and-tea-urn world she'd later have to fight her way through.
During the war she worked at the British Coal Utilisation Research Association, studying the physical structure of coal, which became the basis of her 1945 PhD. At King's College London in 1951 she turned her sharpened X-ray techniques on DNA. With her student Raymond Gosling she produced the famous Photograph 51 in 1952, a sharp image of the molecule.
Here's the stoush. In January 1953 her King's colleague Maurice Wilkins showed Photograph 51 to James Watson without her knowledge or permission. Watson and Crick built their double-helix model within weeks, and their Nature paper acknowledged only a general knowledge of her unpublished work. Wilkins had expected her to work as his assistant while she'd been told she would lead the DNA project, so the two clashed from the start.
Franklin was cautious and wouldn't draw conclusions from a single photo. She bluntly told Watson and Crick that their first model was flawed. A review of her biography describes her as rigid and meticulous, and 'abrupt and peremptory' when she felt unappreciated. That's a human being with a temper, not a pattern of mistreating people. She left King's after 27 months for a more collegial lab at Birkbeck.
On the harm test, nothing of hers came up: no words against anyone, no campaigns, no grievance. The harm in her story was aimed at her. Watson's 1968 memoir described her in belittling terms, though its epilogue later admitted his early impressions were often wrong and praised her honesty and generosity. Anne Sayre's 1975 book then helped cast her as a victim of sexism in science.
She didn't sulk about it. According to the Christian Science Monitor, she became friends with Crick and his wife and stayed on friendly terms with Watson. At Birkbeck she moved to virus structure, and her tobacco mosaic virus photographs were among the clearest ever taken. She died in 1958, aged 37, so she never saw the 1962 Nobel Prize go to Watson, Crick and Wilkins. The prize can't be given posthumously.