In Our Time - Archive: Rosalind Franklin

Episode Date: September 17, 2026

Misha Glenny delves in to the In Our Time archive to select ten episodes for listeners to revisit. His seventh choice is the pioneering scientist Rosalind Franklin (1920 - 1958), first released in February 2018. During her distinguished career, Franklin carried out ground-breaking research into coal and viruses but she is perhaps best remembered for her investigations in the field of DNA. In 1952 her research generated a famous image that became known as Photograph 51. When the Cambridge scientists Francis Crick and James Watson saw this image, it enabled them the following year to work out that DNA has a double-helix structure, one of the most important discoveries of modern science. Watson, Crick and Franklin's colleague Maurice Wilkins received a Nobel Prize in 1962 for this achievement but Franklin did not and today many people believe that Franklin has not received enough recognition for her work. With:Patricia Fara President of the British Society for the History of ScienceJim Naismith Interim lead of the Rosalind Franklin Institute, Director of the Research Complex at Harwell and Professor at the University of OxfordJudith Howard Professor of Chemistry at Durham UniversityProducer: Victoria Brignell.Reading list:Jenifer Glynn, My Sister Rosalind Franklin (Oxford University Press, 2012)Kersten T. Hall, The Man in the Monkeynut Coat: William Astbury and the Forgotten Road to the Double-Helix (Oxford University Press, 2014)Brenda Maddox, Rosalind Franklin: The Dark Lady of DNA (HarperCollins, 2002)Anne Sayre, Rosalind Franklin and DNA (first published 1975; W. W. Norton, 2000)James D. Watson, The Double Helix: A Personal Account of the Discovery of the Structure of DNA (first published 1968; W&N, 2010)In Our Time is a BBC Studios productionSpanning history, religion, culture, science and philosophy, In Our Time from BBC Radio 4 is essential listening for the intellectually curious. In each episode, host Misha Glenny and expert guests explore the characters, events and discoveries that have shaped our world.

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Plan your next detour at go-turkiya.com today. This is in our time from BBC Radio 4 and this is one of more than a thousand episodes. you can find in the In Our Time Archive. A reading list for this edition can be found in the episode description wherever you're listening. I hope you enjoy the program. Hello, today's summer selection from the In Our Time Archive considers the life and work of Rosalyn Franklin, a chemist and x-ray crystallographer for many years she was overshadowed by male scientists. It's widely thought that her key role in revealing the structure and function

of DNA was underplayed for decades. The challenges which women faced in higher education when she started her degree in natural sciences at Cambridge in the late 30s were significant. She was the outstanding student of her year, gaining a first and publishing path-breaking papers, but by dint of her sex, Franklin was not awarded a degree, but a mere diploma. While working on X-ray crystallography at King's College, she found her work blighted by overbearing male supervisors who would seek to take credit for her work. But together with one man, her student Raymond Gosling, who recognised her genius, she was responsible for Photo 51, an image which Crick and Watson saw as the proof they needed to confirm their thinking about DNA. When the Nobel Committee announced

Crick and Watson as winners of the Prize for Medicine in 1962, there was no mention of Franklin. I hope this episode of In Our Time goes a little way to giving Franklin the recognition she deserves. Enjoy listening. Hello, in 1952, Rosalind Franklin was at King's College London, investigating the structure of DNA, creating images for analysis. One of the images made for that work, Photograph 51, has become famous. It provided information needed to reduce the structure of DNA one of the great achievements of 20th century science for which Francis Crick, James Watson and Morris Wilkins

later received the Nobel Prize. But not Franklin, who moved on from DNA's structure to do pioneering research into coal and viruses. And since her death, when she was only 37, many have argued that she deserved greater recognition both of her role in the understanding of DNA and as a scientist more generally. With me to discuss Rodland Franklin's life and work

are Patricia Farrah, President of the British Society for the History of Science, Jim Naismith, interim leader of the Rosalind Franklin Institute, director of the research complex at Howell and professor at the University of Oxford, and Judith Howard, Professor of Chemistry at Durham University. Patricia Farah, what was Rosalind Franklin's upbringing? Her upbringing, I think, was very important for the rest of her life, for two main reasons. Firstly, she was very, very close to her family,

and we know a lot about her childhood, about her relationships with her family, because whenever she was away from home, she wrote them very long, very eloquent, very intimate letters, which are absolutely marvellous to read nowadays. So she had three brothers, one sister. She was brought up in a very affluent, not wealthy, but very affluent family in London, in Notting Hillgate. There were lots of other family members dotted around quite nearby, so it was a very, very large, close-knit family. She loved them a lot. The only thing she ever resented, or the main thing she ever resented against her parents, because everybody resents their parents from time to time. But the main thing was when she was about nine or ten, for the

benefit of her health, she was sent away for a couple of years to a boarding school near the coast. And she deeply regretted that, but as soon as she came back, she got sent to St. Paul's day school in London, where she absolutely flourished. She worked very hard. She was very, very good at sport. She was never good at music. She developed some very, very close. friendships. The other important thing I think about her upbringing and about this extended family is that she was born into a very well-established group of Anglo-Jewish people. And she wasn't religious herself, but the fact that she was born into this Jewish network was very important. So, for example, between the wars and during the war, her family took in some Jewish refugees

and they were engaged a lot in Jewish philanthropic works. She was always very, very, very sensitive about any suggestion of anti-Semitism, but when she went to Cambridge, she was welcomed into a Jewish society there. So I think these two aspects of her upbringing, the very, very warm, loving, extended family and the fact that it was a Jewish family were both very significant. She went up to Cambridge in 1938 to read natural sciences. How unusual was that for a woman at that time? It was extremely unusual to read the sciences. In any case, there was a sort of a rule, a regulation at Cambridge that limited the total number of women to 500 to be 10% of the total faculty in the whole university. There were only two women's colleges then, Newnham and Gerton.

All the other colleges were men only. It's difficult to tell the statistics because it was wartime, well, in the following year it was wartime, which meant that a lot of the male lecturers and a lot of the male students were absent. So actually, while she was there, there was a slightly higher proportion of women than there were normally. But so to study the sciences was a very, very unusual thing to do. Remembering my own experiences as a physics undergraduate at Oxford was, again, still vastly outnumbered by men, what mattered, isn't the number of men, it's the attitudes towards the women.

So at that stage, when Rosalind Franklin was at Cambridge, women couldn't graduate. They didn't technically belong to the university. they were there as a presence, but they weren't ordinary students. And I think it's that sort of feeling that she was different apart and oddity. I think it's that aspect of her life at Cambridge, which was very difficult for her to cope with. She didn't get, they weren't allowed to get degrees. They've got diplomas, for instance. That's right, yes.

She took all the examinations, and in one year she got a first. So she was academically, she was right up at the top, but she never got the formal certificate. at she never went through the very elaborate, very ceremonial graduation ceremony that still practice at Cambridge today, but no women were allowed to participate in that before 1948. Excuse me, given that it was unusual for a woman to study natural sciences at Cambridge, how did she come to want to study that? Because that was what she'd loved ever since she was a small child. She was absolutely passionate about science.

She was very, very good at mathematics. That was what she wanted to do, and she was quite single-minded. she knew from a young age that that was going to be her life. She wrote somewhere that it was her passion. It was almost like a religious faith, this desire to find out about the world. Jim Neosmith, after graduating, she carried on research into cold, and the war is on at that stage. Her war was about to start when she graduated.

And her father, as I understand, is urging her to do war work, but she resisted him and stayed on the university. And did a sort of, can you develop what you did there? Yeah, so it seems. to us now because we think of coal is relatively dull, but of course coal was really central to the country's existence. It's how we made all the electricity, the trains were running coal. So there was a huge importance in understanding coal and its properties. And so what she did was it was known that coal was porous and had unusual densities and it varied depending where you dug

the coal. And coals had different properties and we didn't really understand why they had different properties. We didn't understand what the importance of those was. So what she did was that she used gases to probe the density of coal and she began to work out that there were voids in the coal that were accessible to gases such as helium, others to larger molecules, and if you heated it, the properties of coal would change. And that was very important

because some types of coal are called graphitizing and others are non-graffatizing. What that means is when you heat them, some of them turn into graphite, which is stuff in your pencil, and others turn into like a glass. and that type of glassy coal is very valuable. It's very unusual. And there was no...

She did all the work that sort of predicted and unpacked that as to what type of coal you had. What effect did that happen? And this sounds very practical. They rushed away into the coal mines and said, dig this and dig that. I mean, I'm being ridiculous. But was something like that happened? Yeah. So what it meant was that when you dug up a type of coal, you would know how it would behave under certain circumstances.

And that was really important because it mattered what type of coal you would use. And so you could develop tests that she did, that would allow you to work that out without just having to try and see. In that research as a young woman, is she doing things that is she going into territory that hadn't been explored before? Yes, she had been known about this puzzle about the porosity of coal, but she really mapped that out and published single author papers as a PhD student. And just after her PhD in what was called the British coal investigations,

that'd be curate. and these were her work. They were seen as her work and she was recognised for it at the time. She researched for much of her career, she researched using X-ray diffraction. Could you explain what that means and how she used it? So X-ray diffraction is... Is this when she's in Paris and when she's in England as well?

She began that work in Paris. She went to Paris for four years. With Meering. And he had been a pioneer of application of X-rays to study more of these complex sort of amorphous solid. So crystallography was sort of born in Germany in the UK, by the Braggs, of course, famous in the UK. And that had been applied to crystals.

So if you think of a Kit-Kat, if I break a Kit-Kat, you imagine all the layers in a Kit-Kat. Now, if you turn those layers in a certain way when X-rays hit them, and I'm simplifying, of course, but you'll get a diffracted beam at a certain angle. And so the X-rays will bounce off, and the efficiency of that bouncing tells you what was in the layer. So it allows you to understand the properties,

see all the atoms inside a molecule. So it's incredibly useful. And what she learned in Mearying's lab was its application to not just single crystals, but these more amorphous, complex organ shapes and sizes that were in coal. And her work in Mearing's lab established why coals would graphetize and why they wouldn't. So she had known that you could,

She had worked out that property, but with her x-ray work, she was able to give a molecular understanding as to the type of coal. So those four years in Paris were very advanced learning for her. Paris was a good place to go for x-ray work, of course. For this type of x-ray work, it was leading, and she did some leading research there. You know, she worked out. So if you'd asked people by that stage,

who was one of the experts in understanding the structure of coal, her name would have been that person. Judith Howard, can you tell you, us more about crystallography and x-ray in terms of her increasing absorption in the subject? Well, as we've heard that she was taught really, apart from her undergraduate learning, that she would have done in Cambridge. She was taught by mirroring and Mathieu in Paris, and they were experts in this field of disorder. And so she... Disorder? The non-ordered material, such as coal. It wasn't a single crystal, it wasn't

crystalline as we would know it. And so she was working with these experts to understand those properties of coal, well, different forms of carbon. And one of the things that was important, of course, was discovering these non-graphitic type of carbons, which we used what we call molecular sieves today. And they were industrially important, and coal was generally important. Her understanding of crystallography came really, I mean, she became an expert in handling the materials. She was primarily a physical chemist. She had very good technique. She was single-minded.

She was very careful. She was an accurate experimentalist. And so I think she really sort of thrived in an environment, which this lab was in Paris. She loved Paris, and she worked very hard. She learnt more about crystallography when she moved back to London and when she moved to the laboratory at Kings. But crystallography, can you explain to listeners

who like the word and are getting a feel for it, more precisely what she was looking for and what it was about. Well, what she was trying to determine was the order of the atoms inside the structure, inside the material. We can't see into a lump of coal. We can't see ourselves into a lump of sugar or a piece of salt, a grain of salt rather. But the technique of x-ray diffraction allows you to determine.

the molecular composition, and in other words, where the atoms are inside those materials. That's important because the structure relates to the function. And of course, we're moving into where we look at the structures of biological materials where they relate to the function. But as we were hearing from Jim earlier, the types of coal and their properties, their function, was vitally important at the time of the war. Tell me anything from her notebooks or from the letters, Patricia mentioned, at the beginning of the program about her love for crystallography and how it grew?

I think she found it, yes, she did enjoy it very much passionately, but she found it an exact science. She found it was somewhere where she could get an answer that was important, that was important, not just for the sake of getting a scientific response, a result, sorry, but also to where it was industrially important. And that was the stage at which she was at in Paris, but of course moving into biology, she would understand why a knowledge of the molecular structure

was important for other reasons. So that would come in later in the story. How does the crystallography undertaken today compare with the work that Rosalind Franklin was doing then in Paris and just after? Well, the very early equipment that they would have had then, a lot of it was, so to speak, homemade. They were using fairly primitive x-ray tubes.

she had to very often clean her diffusion pumps that created the vacuum in the tubes and for this she would be using literally buckets of benzene to clean out the pumps. The cameras were very often homemade. When I say a camera, one had to support the sample, whether it was a piece of coal, a crystal fiber. The sample has to be supported in some way so that you can direct the beam at it in an ordered way. and those were to some extent made by her and she understood them, she knew how to deal with them.

But of course the time taken to take one of these photographic plays to record the data and it was the only way they could do it was much, much longer. Some of her exposures for the DNA fibres later were about 100 hours which seems amazing today. And of course we didn't have the computers. A lot of the, principally the work was done by hand. we had, if you like, mathematical formally to work from, but we didn't have the computers.

Today, of course, the sort of work that she was doing, the data collected now digitally. We have very fast computers. We have instruments that are made by companies very often. We don't have to make our own. And so it's the speed of which things have changed, but not surprisingly, over 50, 60 years, the technology has moved on, which makes us able to look at, materials in a different way and to be able to look at structure

evolution over time, over temperature and so on. It's not a different science fundamentally but the way it's used is different today. Patricia Farrow, can we just dwell on Paris a little bit? Because it was so important to her emotionally. She enjoyed it very much.

She went for two years, stayed for four and came back, we can talk about that in half a minute or so, but what else did she enjoy in Paris? The life in Paris because she was not in England? Well, she'd be, first went to France when she was a child and then she went again for a few months in between leaving school and going to university.

A lot of people write about Rosalind Franklin that her life was rather complementalised. When she was in England, she had one set of characteristics which she showed to people at work and she had another set where she was very friendly and outgoing and she had lots of close colleagues and family. I think in Paris those two came together and there wasn't the discrimination and the exclusion from the workplace, which she certainly experienced at Kings. Kings notoriously she wasn't allowed into the common room. But in Paris, she was men and women were on equal terms, so she had a good social life. And she also, she was very athletic. She loved going for walks in mountains and going on extended trips. And so that was also something she could do.

in France as well. So she liked the social life, she liked the active life, and she loved being integrated within the laboratory. Was it quite an advanced community of scientists working with X-RISE at the time? Was she within? Oh, she was at the cutting edge of that particular area of science. She was doing very, very advanced work. It was seen as being very, very important, and she really enjoyed it. It was a great tussle, whether to stay in France or whether to come back to England. One of the main reasons she came back to England was that was where her very, very close friends lived and she needed to be with them. Your sales order says one thing. Your inventory says another. Your spreadsheet says, good luck.

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Visit Odu.com to book a demo. It's O'DO.com. See them. Jim, Jim Neh Smith, in 1951, she did come back to England to London, went to got a job at King's College, where research was being undertaken into DNA, and it was not the only place. DNA was being researched in various other places, notably Cambridge.

Why was the interest in DNA becoming more intense at that time? because by that stage we had worked out that that was the information transfer so what do you mean by that if we think about parent and child you know the characteristics of a parent that appear in a child are information transfer when you get a plant from a seed we know that there's information and so there's been a big puzzle for many years about how that information

what was the basis of hereditary and by this stage by 1950s it was understood that this was DNA. So there was a tremendous excitement to work out. It was understood that this was DNA, but they didn't know what DNA was. Correct. So why did they call it? Why did they, it was understood it was DNA? I don't get it.

I understood it was DNA, but they don't know what it is. Why did they understand it was if they didn't know what it was? They knew about the chemistry of it. They could tell you what it was composed of, nucleic acids, and they were linked in polymers, but they'd no idea how that then led to information transfer. So they had known that if you take DNA from one organism, and put it in another organism that,

they were doing sort of primitive transfer experiments and they had worked out, the DNA contained instruction book for life, but they'd no idea how it worked. And as Judith had said, the ability to see molecules in three dimensions tells you how they work. That's a chemist's belief.

Were those who were working on it aware of how dramatic and how very important this was going to be, if discovered? I think so Or when discovered, yeah I think everybody under I mean it was the great challenge of its age to understand how you would transfer information

from parent to child How does DNA copy itself It was such an important question That people understood it would be earth shattering Judith can we come back to women And crystallography Quite a few women went into crystallography Was it had a particular

A little lure for them Or was an accident or where are we I think it certainly wasn't an accident I mean, in the early days of the subject, and this was a new subject, even at the time Rosalynne was working, it wasn't that old. I mean, after all, Bragg had done the seminal work in 1912. But there were, could I say, enlightened men in the field in the early days who didn't try and keep the women scientists who wanted to join them.

They didn't want to keep them out. They encouraged them to come in. There were several, in the early days, very notable women. Rosalind would have been one of them. She was already, but she didn't live long enough to be. become a household name, let's say, well she is, but differently. Dorothy Hodgkin, Kathleen Lonsdale. And there were people, not only the Braggs, but Bernal, Max Proutes,

the great names that we know in the subject were encouraging to the women to join them. Patricia Prasurer, she wasn't, let's get, she's got to Kings and there's Morris Wilkins, and there seems to be a misunderstanding from the start between the two of them. What was that and how did it, if it did resolve itself? Well, she was originally employed to investigate proteins because at that stage there was still some confusion and whether it was the protein or the DNA that was responsible for heredity. And then they decided to focus on DNA

and she was told by letter that she was going to be switched from proteins. She was told by letter that she was going to be working with a PhD student called Ray Gosling. Morris Wilkins was told that she was arriving but he had the impression that she was working for him in his team at a lower level. And it was unfortunate a coincidence that when she first got there the first day, he was away on holiday. So the whole thing was shrouded in confusion right from the very beginning. And then on top of that, there seems to have been a huge personal animosity between them.

They just did not get on with each other. And I imagine, as it's typical in those situations, they were probably equally to blame. So right from the very beginning, Rosalind Franklin assumed she was working on her own in charge of Ray Gosling. She was his PhD supervisor. Wilkins chose to assume that she was working with him and for him. And that was the source of all the problems that ensued over the next few years. And the daily working arrangements, as you alluded to briefly earlier at that college, where we think about anti-diluvian, but it's in a lifetime,

that women were not allowed into the... Can you tell us? I mean, I think part of the problem I think it still applies to women today. What's technically enshrined in law isn't actually what happened. So the attitudes prevailed against her. She wasn't allowed into the shared common room for lunch.

But then there's other things. The men would go out to the bar afterwards. There was quite a sort of drink and blokey sort of culture in the group. And she wasn't allowed to go with them to the bar. So in all sorts of, of small ways. She was made to feel like an outsider. She wasn't invited to party. She just wasn't part of the social group. And that quite rapidly can make somebody feel very isolated. The one person

who remained extremely loyal to her throughout was her PhD student, Ray Gosling. And it was Ray Gosling who took the famous photograph, and he really admired her and liked her a lot. And we now come to this photograph, Jim and I, Smith. Photograph, 51. Can you tell us about that? Yeah, so Wilkins had already began to take photographs of DNA and the DNA samples had come from Switzerland and they were better than anything people had seen before. But what Franklin's unique contribution was was that the first photographs were difficult to interpret,

they were cloud, you know, it was a complex pattern that wasn't easily understood. And Franklin worked out that she could convert what became known as A-form DNA which is kind of like a dehydrated form to B-form DNA which is hydrated. and she could interconvert between those two. Now the photograph 51 is the B form of DNA,

which is a hydrated, to give an example, the difference between A and B, if I imagine a bath towel soaked in water and I turn it into, you know, swirl it around my hand to it's a nice sausage shape. If I squeeze it, the water comes out and the towel shortens. So A form is a kind of twisted, squeezed out with less water in it and slightly shorter shape. B form is a swollen, full of water form.

but B form was clear that it was helical. It was very obvious it was helical and as soon as Watson saw it and the measurements it contained, he made that leap. So that photograph 51 was a seminal moment. Do we have any record of what Roslyn Franklin thought when she saw it? She realised it was a really important image and she reported it in an MRC report,

but they had this agreement in Kings that she would work in A form and Wilkins would work in B form. And it was one of those curious things that if you look at the King's lab and compare it to the Cambridge Lab, as we were just talking a bit about earlier, there wasn't the same sense of all in it together bouncing ideas off one another. And if you look at the discovery of DNA, it wasn't just Watson Crick. There was a lot of people they were bouncing ideas off in that lab. And little snippets came, that allowed them to get to their model. The King's Lab, as I read it, didn't have that sense of sharing and discussion. and they suffered for it. Judith Howard, let's go back to Watson.

Jim Watson saw this photograph, 51. Can you tell us how he reacted and how that fitted into the research that he and Crick were doing back at Cambridge? Yes, I think in an unguarded moment, one could say that Wilkins had shown Watson who was visiting Kings, this famous 51 photograph.

What he ought not to have done, you think? Well, there was competition between Kings and Cambridge. Why would you do it then? Well, Wilkins was friendly with Watson and Crick, and he would be proud of the best photograph that had been taken to date of DNA had come from his lab. They had already been speaking,

that is Watson and Crick, with Wilkins, on the matter whenever Wilkins visited Cambridge. I don't think there were too many secrets, as you say, ideas bounce off each other, but they didn't include Roslyn in this discussion. And I say unguarded, because perhaps he shouldn't have done, yes, but then, as I say, they were sharing information. and Watson immediately recognised the significance of this,

the Black Cross, as we know it, on the photograph, and how important that was to let him know it was a helical structure. They built, Watson and Crick had built a model of DNA a year previous, but it was wrong. They had the phosphate groups in the wrong place and the bases in the wrong place. And this meant that they had to rethink their structure, but with the information that came from this one photograph, and together with all the other information, as Jim says,

that was being bounced around, different ideas, different people really contributed to the whole story. Rosalind was determined not to start building models until she was certain of her data. And the pair, Watson and Crick, had a different attitude. It was sort of, hey, let's go build a model, let's see if we can do this. We've got enough information. And the information, experimental data, as they called it,

information, had all come from other people because they were very bright people, but they had not collected the x-ray data themselves. That information had come from Kings. And earlier from Asprey's lab, I should say. So they made the model on the basis, well, it often happens in science, in all sorts of disciplines, isn't it,

from other people's information that they found a new way of putting together? Yes, and it was a very successful move. It was a leap of imagination, one could say, but it was certainly very successful, and it gave them the clue, as we were hearing earlier, from Jim about the transfer of information and why DNA was just so important to hereditary. Did they tell Roslyn Franklin about this when they found, did they include her in the conversation?

Was she part of this? You've talked about the three men knowing each other, but she also was a friend of Crix, as I understand it, and so on. So was she not included? Jim, you had to say something. Only after they had done the rounds of the model. They agreed for publication. It was shared before they actually reported it, but they didn't invite her to bounce ideas off, no.

They had worked out the structure and then she was told. And they never really told her they'd used her photograph. And that was never made clear to her or to others what a central role that photograph had played. Was it the central role? I think so. Personally, I think it was. I mean if she'd been working on her own she too would have I think achieved the same result but later they could have collected some data in Cambridge from other people

and they would have taken longer to reach the point at which they were able to build this correct model so to some extent it was a question of timing there was a bit of a race and the race of course included as well Linus Pauling across in California But I think it also represents two different ways of approaching science. And we tend to celebrate Watson and Crick because precisely they made this imaginative leap. It was very intuitive. It was very creative.

It's often a eureka moment, a flash of inspiration. But there is another way of doing science, which is to be very methodological, to be very systematic, not to hazard any guess until you can back it up with solid information. And that was the route that Rosalind Franklin followed. and it is what scientists are taught to do, to be systematic, to rely on their observations.

In a sense, Crick and Watson succeeded because they broke all the rules. And now we celebrate them for doing that. I wouldn't, I might slightly disagree with that, but I think the point is true. There are certainly two approaches. But Franklin was, and this sometimes was the myth created, that she was unimaginative. That's far from the truth.

That it shone in her work in coal and then later with viruses. She was very smart. She was able to make leaps of imagination. My own view is that it was the problem of this. She was tied to A-form. This was a B-form result. She didn't give it the attention that she should have done, and that team in Kings wouldn't work as a team. Had they all looked at that, it might have been different. And also, as I understand it, the A-form, it was less obvious

that it was a helical structure. And one of the things she worried about was that when A changed into B, that it became helical. and so when you looked at the A-form, it actually wasn't helical. And Crick and Watson chose to ignore that distinction. And that was an important part of one important reason for her reservation, for her hesitation, for her insistence on getting everything firmly documented and sorted out.

She was, nonetheless, the first person to recognise that you could interconvert the A-form to the B-form. And it was a question of the humidity. She was an expert being good physical chemist, from her early work and her undergraduate studies in the time in France, she knew how to hydrate fibres or to dehydrate them. And that was absolutely crucial in knowing the interconverted. So if there was a helix in one form,

it made sense that there should be helix in the other. But she did not want to make that supposition or extracted it just as an intuitive guess rather than having the data. You said earlier that she wasn't told they'd used her photograph. was she ever told? Did she die without knowing? I mean, that's been rather dramatic, but was it true? Did she die without knowing? I think from what I read now, it appears that she didn't really know just how critical that particular photograph was to the leap. Although it was published in the Nature paper, I don't think that the history that emerged of what a crucial role that played.

And it wasn't just as simple as they looked at the helix. Also the space group, which is a chrysalography term, was really important because that allowed Crick to work out. the strands had to run in opposite directions. And she, because she hadn't really analysed it, I hadn't come to that conclusion. She remained very friendly, particularly with Crick, right until the time she died, and that would have been unlikely to have happened

if she'd realised how photo had been used. There was a report that she had written because of her fellowship that she'd received, and this report fell into the hands of the people in Cambridge. In that report, she did give the dimensions so that she'd extracted from her photographs, her careful results, which showed that the separation of the base pairs was a certain value, the turn on the helix was a certain magnitude,

and the diameter of the structure was a certain magnitude as well. Now, all these data and the space group were in that report, and again, that had been picked up in Cambridge. So this is all information feeding in to the model that was built finally in Cambridge. And I don't think everybody recognises that that, it wasn't handled properly and she wasn't given the credit. But to set aside that is also the thing that science isn't supposed to work in secret. These are publicly funded research.

The idea you can't just hide data because you don't want others to see it. And so there is that countervailing view is that if the information was known, it shouldn't be kept secret. But I think that what was the problem was she was never given the credit at the time as to how important that image was. But against that, Watson, according to his own account quite deliberately and self-consciously embarked on a race, joined with Crick, against the group of Kings and against Pauling against everybody else. He wanted to be there first.

That was really, really important to him, and he wrote about that quite openly later. The only thing I would add is that there's a difference really between working in secret and having things which are confidential, perhaps, until they're published. And I think we all know the difference of that as working scientists, but we don't really work in secret ultimately because we need to publish. We want to publish. We want to give the world the answers. Patricia, why did Watson and Crick and Wilkins receive the Nobel Prize for discovering DNA and not Franklin? Well, the internal workings of the Nobel Prize Committee are quite difficult to decipher sometimes, but there are two technical reasons why she couldn't have received it.

The first is that by the time they announced the prize, she had already died, and you can only be awarded the Nobel Prize while you're alive. The other problem is that it can only be awarded to a maximum of three people. So if she had been alive, I would like to think that it would have been awarded to Watson Crick and Franklin. Is it possible to weigh the value of her contribution in the discovery, one of the great scientists discoveries all time. Is that possible? I think the contribution

Rosalind made was enormous. It's very hard to put a number on it because there were snippets of information coming from different directions, people working in different ways on the same material, people doing spectroscopy, people doing different biochemistry, using biochemistry tools. To put a number on it would be extremely difficult.

I don't know if my colleagues want to put a number on it. I don't think I do. But it was significant, Melvin, because of the way in... It was a jigsaw, it was a piece of the jigsaw, which at the time was crucially important. The question we could all ask is, had she lived, would she have shared the Nobel Prize? Yeah.

She went on to do... Now, to move aside from DNA for a second, she did some very fine work, according to her brethren, very fine work indeed, in science of her own bat, as it were. When she, after leaving King, she went to Birkbeck in London where she worked on viruses, for instance. Can you tell us a little about that?

Well, she moved from Kings to Birkbeck to work in the lab of Bernal. And there the atmosphere was really quite different, and she started work on viruses. She was working on the tobacco mosaic virus. Now Crick had worked on this in Cambridge, or Cambridge had been working on this scientist there, and they did share information. and information was shared between those working on these viruses rather.

And one required to get the samples, which were single crystals, they weren't easy to get, and a lot of her experience that she'd had leading up to this point enabled her to get the material in the right form and get some very good photographs. And she had all this experience behind her on working with the nucleic acid structures. And I think that wasn't the only time that she did, extremely seminal independent research.

She'd been publishing single author papers when she was at Cambridge, part of her degree. Five papers came out in that time. She did independent work and was publishing again, single author papers from her time in Paris. It's strange that out of a shortened, a foreshortened career,

where she was an excellent scientist, the story tends to concentrate on a period of less than two years. It's a vital point in time of the discovery of the structure of DNA but it is just part of her career. The virus, the details in which she worked out for the virus structures made a significant impact on people working in the field.

Bragg asked her to be able to build a big structure for him for an exhibition, which she did. There are interesting stories about that. I don't know whether the gym wants to add more on virus structures. Again, the reason viruses attracted people was because they were sort of not living, but they were able to transfer information. And so they knew they had to have instruction sets inside them.

And what Rosalind Franklin did was work out what the organisation of the protein shell was and where the nucleic acids were inside the virus. And that had come along history. Bernal had taken some of the early pictures. But Franklin's work established a question that was key to understanding them, where was the nucleic acids?

And her work was seminal. And it was seen as really an important discovery that we understood how viruses were organised in the first time. Now in terms of seeing how other scientists developed their lives, to die when you were 37, as she did, it was obviously a terrific loss. She died of a bavarian cancer.

I had that anything to do with working with x-rays in Paris or working with x-rays at a time when people were rather careful about it. I think it's difficult to say. I mean, certainly the health and safety aspects that were prevalent in the labs in those days. Sorry, in today, we're not there then. And it would be possibly regarded as a lax way of working from that which we're allowed to do today.

So it wasn't negligence, it might have been ignorance, if there was any fault, if you like, in the way they worked. However, she had had various childhood illnesses. She suffered jaundice when she was 22. She'd had a few health problems, but nothing hugely serious. So it's hard to say whether the radiation was the trigger for the ovarian cancer or a contributor. What she did do, because she was so strongly passionate about her science

and didn't want anything to get in the way, she ignored the early signs. She ignored pains that she was having in America. She wanted to do more of her tour. She stayed meeting people until she really needed to have investigations when she got back from the States on that trip, which was in 1956. And had she caught it sooner, it might be a happier story. Hard to say because our knowledge of how to treat cancer in the late 50s was not as it is today.

And she was given some experimental, in quotes, treatment, and she was taken to the Marston Hospital latterly. It's hard to say, but it certainly, one could say, the X radiation that she received might have been a contributor, but I don't think we can say for certain. I think it's rather ironic that she suffered from ovarian cancer, which is obviously a woman's disease. And I've just been thinking about how she would feel about this programme today. And I get the impression that she would have liked to be remembered, not as a woman,

but as a scientist who did very, very important work in DNA, in coal, in the tobacco mosaic virus. She was not particularly keen on campaigning for women. That wasn't how she thought of herself. and I think she'd rather be remembered as a great scientist for her scientific career, somebody who was determined to continue even though she was ill. I think she'd rather be remembered for that than for being a pioneering woman or a downtrodden woman or anything else in her identity as a woman. She was very, very clever, she was very intellectual, determined, focused person,

and I think that's how she'd like to be remembered. Would you agree with that, Judith? Yes, I think so. Yes. I mean she was not somebody who would go around being a suffragette, if you like, in terms of the scientists.

She was passionate about her science. She wanted to be remembered for that, which is why, of course, she did the work she did. She was well known for it. She published widely, considering her not very many years in science. I think she deserves to be remembered for the work she did as a scientist.

The legacy in part is DNA, but she did a lot more very vital pieces of work than that in her subject. And I think she would be more than happy to remember as that than the, as I say, that this period of her life which was really quite short. And also at the time, DNA wasn't seen as being such a momentous discovery as in retrospect it has turned out to be. Finally, a legacy from you, Jim. I think actually what she would have been most proud of would have been,

the obituary written by J.D. Bernal at the time. And that was contemporaneous. She just died. It was written at the time and it dwelt on her immense contributions to science. It went through systematically what she'd done in Cole, her importance to the DNA story, and also her working viruses. And that was, and that's important for people to remember, is that at the time she was written about in the Times, the New York Times, and in nature and obituary. Very few scientists get that. She was seen at the time as a really important person in science. Well, thank you very much for that. Thank you, Jimenez-Smith, Patricia Parra, Judith Howard.

Next week, we'll be discussing the ancient Chinese warrior and philosopher Sun Tzu, known as the author of The Art of War. Thanks for listening. And the In Our Time podcast gets some extra time now with a few minutes of bonus material from Melvin and his guests. One of the things I was going to say and didn't get an opportunity is just to think about, sort of pick up in a way what I was saying, about different attitudes towards men and women

that you can't actually pin down very easily. And one way of thinking about that is vocabulary. So if you've got a man and a woman who exhibits similar behaviour, in a man, you would use a word such as authoritative, whereas for a woman, you would say she was being authoritarian. It's a small difference, but these small shifts in vocabulary

when you're referring to men and you're referring to women, the slight differences in behaviour and in attitudes, they're something that can affect women quite strongly. So another problem that she had that's very often attributed to women is a great lack of self-confidence. So every time she took exams at Cambridge, there was a great crisis and she was convinced that she'd failed, whereas in fact she came top. And I think...

But that doesn't only apply to women, particularly. It doesn't only apply to women, but this idea that women internalize a lack of self-confidence, because for centuries and centuries and centuries, everybody has assumed that women are intellectually inferior to men. And I think amongst female students, you see that in supervisions and in seminars, they're reluctant to speak out, they're reluctant to express their own ideas, and I think there is this general internalised lack of self-confidence. Yeah. Jim.

One thing that's missed is what a kind person she was, and she made lots of friends in science. Yes. And the thing in Kings was just so dreadfully unhappy for her. But I think the notion that she was in any way distant or loof is sort of dispelled. If you look at Aaron Klug, she left Aaron Klug money in her will that made a huge difference to his life. She had friends throughout science. And the issue with self-confidence, she had overcome that by the time she was at King's.

She was confident in giving public lectures. She defended her work. She had grown way beyond the undergraduate as she said, Patricia was talking about that nervousness. And I think, you know, that that side of her life, that she wasn't some terribly sad victim, she had an unhappy time in Kings. But outside of that period, she made many friends,

she was a well-valued colleague. And she mentored Ken Holmes and Aaron Klug went on to very famous scientists. There's a third name I forget. But they had a huge admiration for it as a person. Well, Ray Gussling would be another example. Yes. Yes, the confidence thing, may have been there at different times in the undergraduate period as well, but certainly when she realised that Linus Pauling's model was incorrect,

she actually wrote to him. I mean, there's the great Linus Pauling, and Roslyn sent him a letter and basically said he was wrong, and I think that shows confidence. She did the same in open speeches, different conferences. If she found that somebody had given a wrong result, she would stand up and say so. We didn't actually bring Linus Pauline in quite enough, did we?

Can you just say a bit more for those listening to this about why Linus Pauling was hovering in the background, threatening to hover in the foreground? He and his colleagues were working on the structure of the nucleic acids, and he had built a model, as I said, was incorrect. In the period just before the structure was announced from Cambridge, there was a paper from Linus Paul and Corey written, which again suggested an incorrect structure.

but this paper was being published in the National Academy of Sciences earlier the same spring. The copy of that paper came to Cambridge, came to Bragg, and it also came to Pauling's son, Peter Pauling, who was at that time in Cambridge. So the information, which was vital, in fact, the work that Linus Pauling had done, because earlier, I forget the year,

maybe one or two years earlier, he published information on the alpha helix. So the idea of helices of, coiled molecules was being investigated. It was being talked about openly. And at one time, it seemed to be a race between the US and the UK. Then, of course, it turned into a bit of a race between Kings and Cambridge. But Linus was, of course, well known for his amazing amount of work in chemistry, the study of chemistry, the chemical bond and so on from the early part of the century. And I can't remember the year of his Nobel Prize, Jim.

He won it for the chemical bond, I can't remember when, but he also won the Peace Prize. He got two prizes. I think he was the first person to get two. No, apart from Maricuree. What was significant about Pauling's paper was there was an elementary error in it. And everybody guessed as soon as somebody pointed that elementary error out to Pauling, Pauling would jump to the correct solution.

That's why there was a huge race in Cambridge, because they realised that Pauling's mind had turned to this in a very serious way, and he was seen as the giant in chemistry. But there was an elementary mistake that Franklin spotted, another spotted in this draft paper. And everybody knew once Pauling found that mistake, he would probably get the right structure. So did they keep it to themselves? The Roslund wrote to him to tell them it was incorrect. And other people had recognized, but they didn't tell them prior to publication.

Because once the paper was published, people told them. But they knew they were in a race for sure. As soon as Paulings, they knew. Science is to some extent competitive. It's collaborative, but it's also competitive. Pauling had heard about the photographs and asked Randall, the head of kings at the time, head of that grouping kings,

for a site of those photographs. And Randall declined because he said, my people are working on it here, essentially. I think Randall's role is quite interesting. You think Wilkins should have declined when Watson asked for a look at the photographs? It's unclear whether

Watson asked to see them or whether Wilkins showed them. And there is a subtle difference there, of course. And as I said, he was very proud of the fact that the best photograph taken to date of DNA was this famous photograph 51. I mean, there are other very good photographs as well, but that was the best one. And he would want to showcase kings. And I think he also, Rosalind Franklin gave a lecture which she showed that photograph, but Watson didn't appreciate the significance of it at the time. He knew that she'd got a good photograph, but I hadn't appreciated the details of it.

because he was too busy duddling. There was also a great confusion about exactly what happened when the articles were printed in nature and what order they were printed in. And unfortunately, the archive of nature was destroyed in afar, I think. And so that's another very, very cloudy grey area that can never be perfectly elucidated, rather like Randall's role at Kings and the relationship between Wilkins and Franklin. It remains very, very blurred. and I don't think anyone can ever know exactly what happened

and what was going on behind the scenes as well. Well, thank you. I thought that was excellent. In our time with Melvin Bragg was produced by Victoria Brignall. I'm Kate Lamble and from Understand from BBC Radio 4, this is rinsed. Last time I was here, there was a tampon and there was a condom. A sewage scandal damaging our rivers. We had an enormous range of animals in the garden.

And that also started to disappear. Uncovered by ordinary folk taking on powerful people. And they told me there's nothing wrong with the river windrush. Basically, go away and stop troubling us. This is the story of how a centuries-old battle between public good and private profit created an almighty stink. And who pays to clean it up? Rinsed.

Listen first on BBC Sounds. And I thought, nah, you're the problem.