Rosalind Franklin loved outdoor adventures and mountain climbing.
Content warning: references to sexual harassment
I first heard of Rosalind Franklin in high school. We watched a 1987 docudrama called “The Race for The Double Helix’. I was fascinated by Franklin’s portrayal— how meticulously she recorded details in her notebook to piece together data from her experiments on DNA structure. I wanted to be just like her! She was intense, dedicated, and meticulous—she refused to make conclusions unless she was 100% certain.
The Contradictory Portrayals of Franklin
To say that Franklin has been portrayed contradictorily is an understatement. Depictions of her have ranged from a martyr for science, to an insufferable shrew, to a close friend of James Watson who magnanimously gave him her data, to an interested collaborator. When we think of Rosalind Franklin, we often concentrate around these themes:
Persistent under-recognition in STEM (Matilda Effect). She never scaled the academic ladder like her male peers, despite having the qualifications and publications that would have earned a male such a job. She never became a professor and was never promoted above research associate.
Obtuse about DNA’s structure: A prevailing narrative is that she had all the data to discover DNA’s structure, but she just ‘sat on it’, unable to connect the dots. More recent evidence has come to light that she knew more about DNA’s structure than history has credited her for.
Victim of Scientific Theft: Franklin’s work around DNA structure is believed to have been distributed by colleagues at King’s College (Maurice Wilkins and Max Perutz) to James Watson and Francis Crick without her credit or permission (however there is now new evidence that she perhaps knew of this data sharing). This data is considered to have been crucial in accurately modelling DNA structure. However, the lines of hierarchy in the lab at King’s College were notoriously unclear. Upon hiring, Franklin assumed she would be an independent researcher, but when she arrived, she was billed as Wilkin’s assistant and thus his junior, despite her notable research accomplishments and that she mentored graduate students (cough, sexism). Many contend, since they were part of the same research group, shared the same funding source and were thus working on the same project, and there were apparently no formal prohibitions on such data sharing, Wilkins and Perutz arguably had a right to share results with another lab. And indeed the lab gained acknowledgement when Wilkins shared the Nobel Prize in DNA’s discovery with Watson and Crick. If Wilkins were indeed Franklin’s senior in the lab, that would reinforce his position more, and such an exchange of data would have been considered standard at the time period.
She would have shared the Nobel Prize if she hadn’t passed away: While Franklin authored several papers related to DNA structure in extremely prestigious science journals, her recognition in the scientific community and in popular media at the time was low and forgotten in the years between her death and the 1970s, when feminist science studies revived interest in her career. Even if Franklin had not passed away before it was awarded, it’s doubtful she would have shared the Nobel Prize.
Tragic Martyr: Franklin died at age 37 from ovarian cancer, largely believed to be sourced from radiation exposure related to her lab work. Some argue that she carried a BRCA gene mutation which would have significantly increased her risk of developing breast or ovarian cancer.
While many argue that scientists were completely ignorant of radiation risk in the lab in the 1950s, this was not the case. She was largely isolated from her male peers and spent inordinate time doing technical bench work. Franklin once tested for such high levels of radiation she was forced on leave for several weeks. However, her female peers**, who were concerned about her radiation exposure at the time, were reluctant to advise her to limit her radiation exposure in the lab, for fear of undermining a women’s progress in STEM. A “keeping up with the boys” mentality might also have driven her to avoid precautions.
Unjustly caricatured: Franklin was famously caricatured in James Watson’s 1968 book The Double Helix as ugly, inept, sexually frustrated, badly dressed and ‘unwomanly’. In both this book and in real life she was cruelly nicknamed “Rosy” behind her back.
Lonely Woman: Franklin did not marry, had no children, mentored few students, and was isolated, even purposely excluded, from the male societies in science. Much has been made of a supposedly unrequited love for Jacques Mering, who supposedly ‘ruined’ her for all other men. Her nun-like portrayal in the film The Double Helix, was criticized by her contemporaries. In reality, she was quite social outside of work, loved cooking, hosting dinner parties and travelling.
Franklin was one of the few women not to conduct affairs with her male colleagues, which earned her the reputation of being ‘prudish’ by her female colleagues. She was also largely ignored by her male colleagues since she did not offer them any sexual attention. By all evidence, Franklin never seemed to have a sexual partner which fueled negative characterizations.
Women caricatured: Rosalind Franklin v. Odile Crick
Franklin first came into the public eye in 1968, years after her death. Watson’s 1968 book of DNA’s discovery called The Double Helix, depicted Rosalind Franklin (nicknamed “Rosy”) as a humorless, rigid, unpleasant shrew.
Outrage over Franklin’s portrayal was first unleashed in a 1971 book by feminist writer Elizabeth Janway. She argued that Watson’s description of Rosalind Franklin was a deliberate attempt to undermine her significant contributions to the discovery of the DNA structure by focusing on her personal traits rather than her scientific competence. Janway scathingly condemned Waston and his praise for ‘dumb’ woman. Apparently, Watson glowingly praised Crick’s wife (Odile) for believing that gravity only went “3 miles” into the sky based on what her husband told her. Janway used Odile Crick to highlight Watson’s sexist double standards for women: he praised women who fit traditional molds (like Odile) while demeaning those who challenged them professionally (like Franklin).
By the same token, normal women are abnormally, indeed farcically, indifferent to science. Odile, the charming French wife of Watson’s colleague, Francis Crick, […] could not follow what we were saying, she was obviously cheered by the fact that Francis was about to bring off his second triumph within the month. If this course of events went on, they would soon be rich and could own a car. At no moment did Francis see any point in trying to simplify the matter [of their scientific endeavor] for Odile’s benefit. Ever since she had told him that gravity went only three miles into the sky, this aspect of their relationship was set.
Odile Crick (nee Speed) (1920-2007), was actually another unsung contributor to DNA’s structure. She was an artist who drew DNA’s structure. Disturbingly, she also drew nudes pictures of her husband’s secretaries. Perhaps this is why her husband sung her praises.
In response, Anne Sayre, a novelist and friend of Franklin (and wife of a crystallographer), set out to write a corrective 1975 memoir of her friend called “Rosalind Franklin and DNA”. According to eminent feminist science scholar Margaret Rossiter:
“Franklin might have dropped from sight had not Watson’s Double Helix of 1968 given her a second and much more negative posthumous reputation as the prototype for the notorious (and largely distorted) “Rosy,” whom he found not only professionally “difficult” but also personally unattractive. It was this unjust and almost malicious caricature as well as the current interest in women scientists that stirred Anne Sayre”
However, Sayre’s memoir has been criticized for its focus on Franklins’ appearance and love life than professional under recognition. According to scholar Sara Delamont, Franklin’s two main biographers Anne Sayre and Brenda Maddox:
are both particularly angry at the caricature of Franklin as badly dressed, short-sighted, sexually frustrated, socially inept and unwomanly. They gathered evidence of her dress sense, fashionable clothes, good eyesight (she did not wear glasses), attraction to men, enthusiastic entertaining, long holidays, deep friendships, and pleasure in the children of others, and they both present this evidence at length
The outrage is more over Franklin’s appearance, rather than her lack of recognition for her work.
Franklin’s ‘rivalry’ with Odile is further revived in a 2015, The Guardian Article, “Sexism in science: did Watson and Crick really steal Rosalind Franklin’s data?”. The writers emphasize Franklin’s magnanimity and ignorance, and notes that Franklin, did come to embrace Odile (a name that conjures up the Black Swan in the ballet). Despite the article conforming that Watson and Crick acquired their data dishonestly and without crediting Franklin, they claim that it wasn’t sexism, just competition.
Franklin died of ovarian cancer in 1958, four years before the Nobel prize was awarded to Watson, Crick and Wilkins for their work on DNA structure. She never learned the full extent to which Watson and Crick had relied on her data to make their model; if she suspected, she did not express any bitterness or frustration, and in subsequent years she became very friendly with Crick and his wife, Odile.
In fact, if anything Franklin was the “Odette” to Crick’s Odile. She was thrifty, hardworking, didn’t take advantage of employees, and dies tragically young.
Defending Franklin as a Scientist
Franklin’s former colleague, Dr. Aaron Klug responded to The Double Helix in the Nature article: “Rosalind Franklin and the Discovery of the Structure of DNA” (1968) which gave a far more chartable view of Rosalind as a scientist on the verge of discovery but was beat out by 2 others.
Her resistance in the winter of 1952-53 to a helical structure, as described by Watson and mentioned by Hamilton, applied only to the A form and not to the B form. Her notebooks for the winter of 1952- 53 show her considering a variety of structures including sheets, rods made of two chains running in opposite directions ·with interdigitated bases and also a pseudohelical structure with non-equivalent phosphate groups which looked like a figure of eight in projection
Klug goes on to venture that
she would finally have seen-and perhaps not much later the relation between the A and B forms. Whatever might have happened, one can see that the “anti-helical” view was not a fad or “mere perversity”. The stage reached by Franklin at the time is a stage recognizable to many scientific workers, when there are apparently contradictory, or discordant, observations jostling for one’s attention and one does not know which are the clues to select for solving the puzzle.
Indeed, Klug inherited Franklin’s notebooks and won the Nobel prize for Chemistry in 1982. Klug painted Frankling as fairly proactive, and that she could have discovered DNA (as she had the data to do it) if she had just talked to Crick for an hour. Klug was one of her few public male defenders. However, he paints her as someone profoundly unlucky, not to have gotten to the finish line first.
Treading the tightrope: Maddox’s Biography
Maddox’s biography is the most comprehensive we currently have. It’s obvious reading it that she tried to tread the tightrope (Crick and Watson were both alive then, and Maddox interviewed Watson). The 2002 biography only provides the most tepid feminist leanings. Her biography was praised by Scientific American:
since James Watson published The Double Helix in 1968, scientists and feminists alike have complained about the inaccuracy and misogyny of his representation of Rosalind Franklin, whose x-ray diffraction patterns provided crucial parameters for the DNA model he built with Francis Crick. In Rosalind Franklin and DNA, published in 1975, Anne Sayre set out to correct the historical record, but her defensive tone makes the book dreary compared with Watson’s riveting personal account, which reads like a novel. At long last, with the publication of Brenda Maddox’s new book, Franklin’s side of the story has been told with an energy and eloquence that rival Watson’s. Rosalind Franklin: The Dark Lady of DNA will attract a large readership, and deservedly so.
While Maddox does touch on the “Rosy” controversy from The Double Helix , she emphasizes that “Watson is still justifying himself’ regarding Franklin. And to be ‘fair’ to Franklin she goes overboard in describing how much Franklin cared about her dress, and fashion, and femininity. A review of Maddox’s biography by Rena Selya emphasizes Maddox’s attempts to be “fair” to Watson:
Maddox describes how Watson and Franklin had many pleasant, positive interactions when she visited the United States and he visited England in the years before her death - Watson even offered to drive Franklin from Woods Hole to California in 1954 and he gave her useful constructive advice about a major publication. […] Maddox explains Franklin’s scientific style not as genius, but as the convergence of her background, training, and innate abilities. Franklin’s slow, careful work on the DNA structure did not lead her immediately to the double helix, because “Rosalind had been trained as a child, as a Paulina [graduate of St. Paul’s School for Girls in London], as an undergraduate, as a scientist, never to overstate the case, never to go beyond hard evidence. An outrageous leap of the imagination would have been as out of place as running up an overdraft or wearing a red strapless dress.” In Maddox’s view, Franklin certainly was a wonderful scientist, but like all scientists, her success was the result of a complex combination of innate ability, social context, and careful train
The biography is woefully inadequate in its description of Franklin’s research. I myself work with DNA but felt that Maddox didn’t explain the science well at all to a lay audience. She didn’t explain the significance or implications of Franklin’s earlier work that well. Maddox avoided discussing the science and focused on the personal.
Maddox does an excellent job of piecing together’ Franklins early life and education, and the role of family and history influenced her career trajectory. I was stunned by how ‘brave’ and fearless Franklin was. She loved hiking, travelling, and trying new things. As her career progressed, she became more dedicated to work, but did not receive adequate promotions. I work in academia so I do understand the structure and promotion hierarchy more, but a lay person would not understand this. While I can be appropriately outraged, they may to realize from Maddox’s description how despite being a brilliant scientist, Franklin never really got the grants, pay or promotion she deserved for her cutting-edge work. She wasn’t just some lab tech-she was writing and publishing.
This book served as a defense of Watson’s negative portrayal of Rosalind, but Maddox goes overboard describing how every person thought Rosalind was the loveliest woman they ever met, and she dressed well, loved cooking, and could be a great hostess—was she trying to equate her to Odile Crick?
Screenshots from “Race for the Double Helix”. Watson (played by Jeff Goldblum) admits he was so distracted by Franklin’s “plain” appearance in real life and lack of makeup that he failed to take accurate notes on her data regarding the water content of DNA. Many interpret Franklin’s sexual disinterest in Watson as a reason why he did not collaborate with her. Notably this scene in the movie depicts Franklin wearing lipstick. There is an entire scene in the film showing her putting on makeup in the bathroom.
Even more troubling is a 2023 Nature article entitled “What Rosalind Franklin truly contributed to the discovery of DNA’s structure”, argued that Franklin’s data, including the famous Photograph 51, was not obtained dishonestly by Watson and Crick. The piece uses emphatic section headers such as “What Franklin really did” and “Acknowledging the truth,” framing itself as a definitive corrective to all the scary feminist campfire stories over the years. Photograph 51, the photo that inspired the correct DNA model structure—the philosopher’s stone of molecular biology—is also the image Franklin was accused of having “sat on” or not understood for months (though Klug denies this claim in his 1968 article).
Photograph 51.
This 2023 Nature article penned by Matthew Cobb and Nathaniel Comfort, for research their upcoming biographies*** of Watson and Crick, claimed that Franklin was not a victim of scientific theft. They revealed previously undiscovered letters and documents indicating that Times Magazine journalist Joan Bruce was writing an article about Franklin’s contributions to DNA in 1953. Franklin was consulted on the article, which described the discovery of DNA as a joint venture between King’s College group (Franklin and Wilkins) and the Cambridge group (Watson and Crick). The Nature article challenges the portrayal of Franklin solely as a victim, instead suggesting she was generous and open in sharing her data.
Since 2023, numerous articles came out claiming that Franklin was an ‘equal’ collaborator and NOT a victim of theft from Watson and Crick. However, this is an oversimplification based on historical evidence of Watson and Crick consulting Wilkins without Franklin’s knowledge regarding several specific documents. While Wilkins sharing updates about his lab’s progress with Watson and Crick was arguably within his rights (no NDAs), Franklin’s exclusion from these exchanges represents a significant lapse of good scholarly conduct that likely sourced from sexism and resentment. Perhaps she gave Wilkins a Carte Blanche, but there is no evidence of this either. Especially when Franklin was hired by King’s College, she was under the impression she would be an independent investigator, when instead she was billed as Wilkin’s assistant/junior which caused significant conflict between them.
(Maddox wonders seriously in her biography why Franklin did not use her feminine wiles & attractive appearance to just win the recently divorced Wilkins over).
I take issue at this framing because these new letters literally confirm she was involved in DNA’s discovery and severely under-credited. The publicity article in Time Magazine about her work being cancelled in 1953 LITERALLY PROVES THIS.
What happened to this 1953 article? It appears to have been scrapped and never published. Franklin indeed showed up as a collaborator at the presentation of DNA’s structure at the Royal Society of London in June 1953. A darker interpretation is that Franklin may have assumed she was regarded as an equal contributor within a shared scientific effort. Given the slow and informal circulation of information (no internet) at the time, she may not have fully perceived the extent to which her data were being used independently by Watson and Crick.
Would she have guessed that she almost vanished from history?
Conclusion
The multiple portrayals of Rosalind Franklin provides an interesting study on sexism, and society’s bewilderment as to how to portray a single woman scientist. Being single is something that apparently must be handled by her biographers. They must work hard to convince us she was not a lesbian, or that she did indeed wear makeup, or that she indeed loved cooking. The other extreme is focusing exclusively on whether or not she was a victim of scientific theft without discussing her other scientific achievements or provide broader insight into her career trajectory and broader contexts in the social, historical, and cultural forces which shaped her career and life.
More to come on Rosalind Franklin I had to split this into multiple articles.
**Honor Fell, one of the 8 women working in the same Randall’s group at King’s, has been quoted by man Watson and Crick defenders as stating that there was ‘no sexism’ in the lab and Franklin’s demeanor was brusque
***James D. Watson. Working title, Honest Jim: The Nurture and Nature of James D Watson,
Crick: A Mind in Motion Hardcover – November 11, 2025
This is a fascinating read. Thanks!
This was a great read!