The death of Nobel laureate Francis Crick on Wednesday (and the ensuing press coverage) is a reminder that his and James Watson's discovery of the double-helix structure of DNA in 1953 has a claim to be, in the long-term, the most important event in the history of the 20th Century.
No doubt, however, the news of Dr. Crick's death will be another opportunity to rehash the hoary old legend that his colleague Rosalind Franklin, "the Sylvia Plath of molecular biology", was robbed of the Nobel in an act of sexist duplicity. Jim Holt laid out the real story in the New Yorker a couple of years ago.
Posted by Alan Allport at July 30, 2004 05:24 AMWe had this one out, or anyway about halfway out in 2002, a little before the New Yorker article. I'd have to read up a lot to know the merits here but it strikes me as suspicious that the New Yorker author refers to Franklin by her first name and the male scientists by their surnames, and discusses her physical appearance as though it did in fact have some bearing on her status as a scientist. Also, this paragraph sounds defensive:
Still, as Maddox notes, "Rosalind's Photograph 51 was the pivotal moment in the discovery of the double helix." Doesn't that make her partly responsible for that discovery? Well, there are two senses of "responsible": a moral sense and a causal sense. Rosalind was not morally responsible for the discovery, because she didn't willingly share or publish her most important data and she spurned would-be collaborators, including Watson and Crick. It was Wilkins who showed Photograph 51 to Watson. Maddox absolves Wilkins of the charge that it was unethical of him to have done so, but still maintains that Wilkins's action was "unwise." It is hard to see why. The ban on Watson and Crick's working on DNA had nothing to do with gentlemanly fair play; it was an attempt to allocate scientific resources efficiently—resources that were quite scarce in postwar Britain. Besides, Rosalind had already had the photograph for nine months without interpreting it correctly—whereas Watson saw its significance at a glance. What was unwise—and a little cowardly—was Watson and Crick's unwillingness to admit to Rosalind that they had been given access to her photograph, and their failure to acknowledge her experimental work more graciously, at least during her lifetime.
and discusses her physical appearance as though it did in fact have some bearing on her status as a scientist.
We have to treat the world as it is, not as we might wish it to be. Rosalind Franklin was judged partly on her appearance, if not as a scientist then certainly as a woman. In that respect it is relevant to know what she looked like; we don't have to condone the values of her peers to acknowledge that they existed.
Posted by: Alan Allport at July 31, 2004 08:42 AMI would add that singling out Franklin as a fragile victim when she obviously did not see herself in that role at all, and indeed went on to some success and personal happiness before her tragic early death, could itself be described as a sexist attitude.
Posted by: Alan Allport at July 31, 2004 08:50 AMRegardless of whether or not Rosalind Watson has been denied her "rightful place" in the annals of discovering DNA, it still does remain that The Double Helix's depiction of her is still that of a hysterical martinette. I remember reading The Double Helix years ago and finding all the scorn heaped on her to be a trifle over the top, and while these pieces have been quick to identify her flaws, they also go a long way toward saying that Crick and Watson were more than a little vindictive in how they portrayed her as well.
Posted by: Graeme Burk at July 31, 2004 10:00 AMNeither Crick nor (especially) Watson appear to have been full of good graces, I agree. There seem to have been a lot of prima donnas in those labs. Perhaps that's the sign of great things taking place.
Posted by: Alan Allport at July 31, 2004 10:04 AMEchidne's blog had a good analysis yesterday of the strange claim that when women point out discrimination they are showing an outdated kind of weakness by adopting the perspective of victims. Really that is as strange as saying it would be bad for the reputation of an injured party to claim compensation for injury.
Posted by: Martha Bridegam at July 31, 2004 01:04 PMBut Rosalind Franklin didn't point out discrimination, did she? It's the third parties who have co-opted her, representing her in a way that she likely would have resented, who have done that. There's no getting away from the fact that the portrayal of "poor little Rosalind" beaten into submission by those horrid men is a straight borrowing of Victorian stereotype. That Crick and Watson (and others) did not always behave well is perhaps reprehensible, but it has no bearing on Franklin's status as a capable and strong-willed scientist who seems to have had a much more sensible attitude towards the whole affair than her subsequent hagiographers.
Posted by: Alan Allport at July 31, 2004 03:15 PMI doubt anyone other than yourself has said "poor little Rosalind" or described her as "beaten into submission." These are your own words, emerging from your own unaccountable association of women's rights with Victorian romantic conventions, which you've used here to create a straw man. Excuse me, woman.
I'm going to avoid using the word "victim" in the following because it seems to cause confusion. And I'm going to use the language of tort law -- the language people speak where the rubber meats the road -- rather than the mushier language of the academy. It may also help if you choose to assume arguendo that the basis for discrimination against Franklin was something other than gender -- something like ethnic origin or disability -- since the special social history of gender discrimination may be blurring the issue for you.
Well, then:
There are degrees of loss from discrimination. Compensable discrimination may be found to have caused damages even to persons who remain employed and have not suffered severe monetary, physical or psychological damages.
For example, many lawsuits have been brought by African-Americans who experience discrimination in clubbish urban fire departments. These complaints are frequently based on "hostile environments" and lost opportunities for promotion. In these cases the employer's defense has usually been that the harassment -- often taking forms such as offensive joking or symbolic drawings left in lockers -- was simple horseplay and that the promotion was simply granted to a more qualified candidate. Outcomes have, of course, varied, but I mention this here to note that firefighters sometimes do win compensation without either losing their jobs or experiencing injury to physical or mental health. Deprivation of a promotion opportunity is in itself a compensable loss. So is the intentional infliction of emotional distress even if experienced by a resilient person.
Franklin's case is that of a competent, admired scientist who retained employment and was honored in many ways, but who is alleged to have been deprived of certain honors or professional advancement due to discrimination because of her membership in a social category into which she had not asked to be born. It is fortunate that she did not evidently suffer complete emotional, physical, or professional devastation, and the fact that she was able to mitigate damages reduces the [hypothetical] liability of the discriminating parties, but it is irrelevant to the actual question presented, which is whether she was unjustly deprived of *additional* honors and professional advancement beyond those she actually obtained.
A member of a historically disadvantaged category should not be deprived of redress for losses simply because the losses do not represent complete personal destruction. Nor should a high-achieving member of the category lose the right to allege discrimination simply because other members of the category have suffered worse things.
You appear to be arguing further that present-day scholars have done Franklin a disservice by taking up her cause after her death. This is nonsensical. To return to the firefighters' example, if an African-American firefighter chose not to report discriminatory harassment, bad job assignments, failure to provide backup in the field, etc., and it happened that a third-party witness reported the discrimination, that would not make the discrimination less real. If anything the case might be more convincing to a trier of fact because a third-party witness' statements are less likely to be self-serving.
When a person incurs a loss due to discrimination, there is every reason for that person or some other witness to seek redress for the loss. It is hardly a sign of personal weakness to do so -- in fact, quite the reverse, given the retaliation and opprobrium that do tend to settle on members of historically disadvantaged categories who demand to be treated as fully entitled human beings.
You appear to be arguing further that present-day scholars have done Franklin a disservice by taking up her cause after her death. This is nonsensical.
Isn't it rather more nonsensical to describe it as "her cause" when it manifestly wasn't her cause, in that she didn't pursue or recognize it as such?
Look, Rosalind Franklin was not some shrinking violet. She was a prickly character who seems to have been fully aware of the institutional disadvantages that a woman scientist of her time labored under; indeed, her bouts of antagonistic behavior towards her colleagues may have been a defensive sensitivity about exactly this sort of sexual bias. Given her personality, if she genuinely believed that she was robbed of the glory for the double-helix discovery she would have surely raised living hell about it. But she did not. How about crediting the woman's own judgment and intelligence instead of characterizing her as some witless pawn whose reputation has had to be rescued by wiser sisters?
(I will throw in one caveat here: we do not, of course, know what Franklin would have thought of the Nobel award, because she was already dead - and incidentally ineligible - at the time Crick and his colleagues received it. Nor (so far as I understand it) is it clear whether she knew the significance of her famous 'Photograph 51', and that Watson had seen the picture without her prior consent. But that takes us into the realm of sheer speculation. What we do know is that she was distinctly unimpressed by the Crick-Watson thesis even after it was published, and so to argue that she was somehow "robbed" of an idea that she didn't even endorse seems to me absurd. One could perhaps argue that she hasn't received as much credit for her involvement in the research as she merited, but that I would suggest has more to do with the popular view of the scientist as singular genius than it does with gender or any other identity politics.)
Posted by: Alan Allport at July 31, 2004 08:41 PMIncidentally ...
These are your own words, emerging from your own unaccountable association of women's rights with Victorian romantic conventions
(1) Well yes, of course they're my own words; rhetorically exaggerated paraphrase is hardly my personal contribution to the English language, is it? (2) Nor am I the first to suggest that, yes, some feminist ideology is very much embued with 19th century romanticism about separate spheres: see for example Katie Roiphe and Cathy Young.
Posted by: Alan Allport at July 31, 2004 08:51 PM