Rex Kerr
1 min readMar 28, 2024

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This is not what happened. Everyone working on it knew or at least suspected it was some sort of helixy something, and Franklin certainly did not know it was an anti-parallel double helix. Franklin's most important contributions were distinguishing the A and B forms, and getting a good measurement of the very large size of the B unit cell and the A form's symmetry group, which were extremely helpful for Watson and Crick's model-building efforts.

Furthermore, people were sharing results in a fairly typical way in the weird collaboration-with-competition model of academia; nothing was stolen, though credit was not acknowledged as fully as it should have been (Watson and Crick claimed to be "stimulated by a knowledge of the general nature of the unpublished experimental results and ideas" of Franklin and Wilkins).

Franklin wasn't credited as much as she should have been, but your description is badly misleading--you seem to have read the pop culture version of the story, not the hey-what-actually-happened version.

For details, the best current treatment is https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-01313-5.

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Rex Kerr
Rex Kerr

Written by Rex Kerr

One who rejoices when everything is made as simple as possible, but no simpler. Sayer of things that may be wrong, but not so bad that they're not even wrong.

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