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  • So did Franklin provably realize the double-helix structure of DNA first or not? A lot of beating about the bush here but the article stops just short of actually explicitly making the claim it's working so hard to imply, AFAICT...

    (edit: should note the HN submission title (at present "Despite what Watson said, Rosalind Franklin understood structure of DNA first") does not actually occur in TFA)

    by bondarchuk
  • > Science historian Alistair Sponsel of the Science History Institute and crystallographer Brian Sutton of KCL argue Franklin knew the earlier photo had revealed a helix—the epiphany Watson claimed for himself—and that is precisely why she made a second, more refined version, photograph 51.

    It was Watson and Crick who discovered the double helix, even if Franklin did write something down about a single helix from a previous photo that they didn't read.

    by philipallstar
  • what? she was doing a form of crystallography that ONLY makes sense if it's a helix? Like, any time you are doing fiber diffraction it's pretty much "a helix". Who claimed she didn't realize it was a helix? I thought the claim was that she didn't recognize the significance of the helical parameters, which of course she couldn't, she wasn't a chemist and didn't have a model in mind with knowable parameters.

    She might have measured those parameters, but she still didn't know what she had (as evidenced by how she subsequently spent a ton of time on Z-dna)

    by dnautics
  • dupe, see older post here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49998006
    by tyjen
  • I think this is a better article on the topic:

    https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-01313-5

    It seems like there are several different parts to the discovery of the "structure of DNA" and different people contributed.

    1. DNA is helical

    2. DNA is a double helix

    3. The ACGT copying mechanism

    Part 1 was Franklin and Wilkins. Part 3 was Watson and Crick. Part 2 is the part under debate, to what degree was the double helix clear from just Franklin's imaging?

    But really, how much does it matter? It seems like the four of them each contributed a lot. The Nobel prize only went to the other three, in large part because Franklin died before it was given out.

    by lacker
  • If I read Franklin's notes this establishes that she did in fact conceive of a double helix and base complementarity in the center (I can't see if she also recognized it was antiparallel).

    That's the first actual evidence I've seen (I am a DNA nerd and have been trying to understand what her contribution to the intellectual discovery of DNA's double-helix antiparalel).

    I would need to go back to Judson's book (Eighth Day of Creation) and see if he actually missed this.

    by dekhn

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