The Sounds of Progress, San Diego: Rosalind Franklin
Speaker: Hey, guys, look at this freaky word I found in our science book when I was pretending to listen to the teacher in science class today. It sounds so weird. Deoxy... I can't say it. You mean DNA, Deoxyribonucleic acid?
Doesn't ring a bell.
Don't you remember, we just had a giant lecture on it.
Oh, so that's what the teacher was talking about all that time. Well, it's hard to keep track.
You know, most people say James Watson and Francis Crick discovered the structure DNA with some help from Maurice Wilkins.
Yeah, but a lot of people forget about one person who made it all possible.
Rosalind Franklin.
Whoo-hoo!
Rosalind Franklin wanted to be a scientist since she was 15 so it's no surprise that she became a biophysicist, chemist and crystallographer when she grew up.
Whoa! She must have been really smart. I don't even know what half that stuff means.
Totally! Rosalind Franklin's my hero or heroine in this case. She contributed so much to science. She even took the first pictures of DNA.
That must have been one small camera.
Are you really that stupid?
Geez, take a joke why can't you.
OK, back on subject now. Anyway, Rosalind took some really cool pictures of DNA but she had some trouble with Maurice Wilkins who worked in the lab she was in. He didn't see her as a peer just because she was a woman.
It's awful that people were so mean to her, just because she wanted to be a scientist. People should have been smarter than that. I mean, she couldn't have lived that long ago, right?
I know. It was only like 50 years or so, maybe even less. I guess people just weren't used to the idea of a woman scientist even though there were several of them already.
Anyway, so Maurice gave the pictures Rosalind had taken and showed it to her rivals, Watson and Crick without her knowing.
Yeah and with Rosalind's pictures they were able to figure out the structure of DNA first even though Rosalind was really close too.
They didn't even give Rosalind the credit she deserved for all her work when they published the information.
She couldn't even have a part of the Nobel Prize that Watson, Crick and Wilkins won because she had died a few years previously. So she got basically zero credit for all her accomplishments.
But today people have begun to realize all the contributions, not just the ones made in DNA, that Rosalind Franklin made to science. I mean, think of all the things we wouldn't be able to do if Rosalind Franklin hadn't become a scientist. Don't you think it's fascinating?
What I think is fascinating is that I've been sitting here nearly 10 minutes receiving another lecture on genetics and all the people involved in it when I could have been watching my favorite TV show. All of this just because I learned a new word? Next time I am so using the dictionary.