Handling DNA credit with care

As a biographer of Rosalind Franklin, I want to go on record as commending Robert Langridge’s obituary of Maurice Wilkins (Physics Today, September 2005, page 72 ). Langridge appropriately summarizes Wilkins’s accomplishments without misappropriating any of Franklin’s and, without assigning blame, describes their inability to communicate. Since 2003, nearly all other articles and books supporting Wilkins attempt to diminish Franklin, as if acknowledging their respective DNA work involved a pulley system, but Langridge deftly avoids that trap. Both Wilkins and Franklin deserve acknowledgment, for different accomplishments, along with James Watson and Francis Crick. Langridge makes only one minor mistake regarding the DNA work: Franklin arrived on 8 January 1951, already reassigned from protein research to DNA in a December letter from John Randall.

Since the DNA contributions by Wilkins were crucial, I included a box on Wilkins in my brief Franklin article in Physics Today (March 2003, page 42 ). Unfortunately, some people had previously extrapolated an unflattering and inaccurate portrait of Wilkins from mistaken descriptions of conditions for women at the King’s College Medical Research Council unit.