Finally, some justice for Rosalind Franklin?

In an earlier post, I criticized my Biochemistry textbook for its failure to mention Rosalind Franklin as a key player in the discovery of the DNA double helix. My A&P textbook is Anatomy & Physiology: The Unity of Form and Function, by Saladin, Fifth edition, Copyright 2010. Maybe it is a sign of the times. I am including their section on Franklin below, as it is the first time I’ve seen a science textbook give credit where credit is due:

Discovery of the Double Helix

Credit for determining the double-helical structure of DNA has gone mainly to James Watson and Francis Crick. The events surrounding their discovery form one of the most dramatic stories of modern science—the subject of many books and at least one movie. When Watson and Crick came to share a laboratory at Cambridge University in 1951, both had barely begun their careers. Watson, age 23, had just completed his Ph.D. in the United States, and Crick, 11 years older, was a doctoral candidate in England. Yet the two were about to become the most famous molecular biologists of the twentieth century, and the discovery that won them such acclaim came without a single laboratory experiment of their own.

Others were fervently at work on DNA, including Rosalind Franklin and Maurice Wilkins at King’s College in London. Using a technique called X-ray diffraction, Franklin had determined that DNA had a repetitious helical structure with sugar and phosphate on the outside of the helix. Without her permission, Wilkins showed one of Franklin’s best X-ray photographs to Watson. Watson said, “The instant I saw the picture my mouth fell open and my pulse began to race.” It provided a flash of insight that allowed the Watson and Crick team to beat Franklin to the goal. They were quickly able to piece together a scale model from cardboard and sheet metal that fully accounted for the known geometry of DNA. They rushed a paper into print in 1953 describing the double helix, barely mentioning the importance of Franklin’s 2 years of painstaking X-ray diffraction work in unlocking the mystery of life’s most important molecule. Franklin published her findings in a separate paper back to back with theirs.

For this discovery, Watson, Crick, and Wilkins shared the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 1962. Nobel Prizes are awarded only to the living, and in the final irony of her career, Rosalind Franklin had died in 1958, at the age of 37, of a cancer possibly induced by the X-rays that were her window on DNA architecture.

Also included are pictures of Rosalind Franklin, one of her X-ray photographs, and Watson and Crick with their model of the double helix.

My Problem with Science Education

And here is my fundamental problem with science education. As I’m reading my Biochemistry textbook (published in 2007) I notice that scientists who made (apparently) important discoveries are highlighted in the sidebar of the textbook, complete with their picture and a profile of their scientific accomplishments. It’s not long before I start to realize they’re all male, and this starts to bother me. So one afternoon I sit down and go through the entire book, scouring the sidebars for examples of female scientists. There are 14 scientists featured and only one female scientist, Marie Curie, who is labeled as a “pioneer in radioactivity.” This is the kind of thing that urks me. And it gets worse.

Let me reiterate that this textbook was published in 2007.

Chapter 22, on ribonucleotides, in its discussion of DNA and RNA, features Watson and Crick as the discoverers of DNA, for which they later shared a Nobel prize. There is, of course, no mention of chemist Rosalind Franklin, whose work was the basis for Watson and Crick’s discovery, which they never got her permission to use, nor did they ever give her any credit. Although this is a highly disputed and controversial topic (there are numerous books written about it, such as The Double Helix, by Watson and Crick), there is no mention of this in the textbook. Black and white. Definitively. Watson and Crick discovered DNA. Whatever.

And it’s not like there aren’t opportunities to feature female scientists. For example, there is an extended discussion of the polyamide Kevlar, used in place of steel in bulletproof vests, and how the uniform system of hydrogen bonds that holds the polymer chains together account for the “amazing” strength of Kevlar. There is a picture of the hydrogen bonding pattern, but no mention of the female chemist Stephanie Kwolek, who synthesized Kevlar while working as a chemist for DuPont.

Why does this matter? Because I’ve done research on the lack of women in science and engineering fields, and the research says that women need to see examples of positive, successful women in science and engineering. Textbooks like this inadvertently send the message that science is a male domain.