Jewish Invention Myths: DNA

One of most popular modern ‘jewish invention’ myths is the idea that jews in fact discovered DNA and that James Watson and Francis Crick ‘stole credit’ from them. This also links into the modern feminist movement and a general attempt to un-person European – especially male European – intellectual and scientific achievement especially in the light of Watson’s scientific realism about both race and sex.

The jewess at the centre of this ‘jewish invention’ myth is one Rosalind Franklin.

To quote JINFO who makes this claim:

‘Finally, Rosalind Franklin's x-ray crystallographic studies of DNA provided the clear evidence for a double helical structure. The theoretical model of Watson+ and Crick+ was largely based on the experimental data provided by the aforementioned chemical and structural analyses.’ (1)

And ‘London Remembers’ gives a bit more depth to it when they write:

‘Crystallographer. Born Chepstow Villas. Worked on DNA X-ray diffraction studies at King's College London with Gosling, Stokes, Wilkins and Wilson. She was responsible for the photograph taken in May 1952, which answered some crucial questions in the research.

Crick and Watson, who won the Nobel Prize for discovering the DNA double helix, relied on these results of Franklin's for their breakthrough. There is some controversy concerning the extent to which they acknowledged that. Some feel that Franklin was not given due recognition due to her gender, her religion (Jewish) or even her class (upper/middle). Died at Royal Marsden Hospital, Chelsea.’ (2)

This claim centers around a photograph called ‘Photograph 51’ which is:

This photograph was taken in May 1952 by Raymond Gosling – not Rosalind Franklin as is commonly claimed – (3) and then given to Franklin who set it aside as it wasn’t what she was studying at that time. Since it was the ‘B’ form of DNA not the ‘A’ form of DNA that Franklin was concentrating on. (4)

Franklin’s involvement with the photograph is largely nonsensical in the sense that she was Gosling supervisor and was the second person to see the photograph but didn’t understand what she was looking at. Indeed, Franklin told Gosling to take Photograph 51 to Franklin’s co-lead in the team Maurice Wilkins as Gosling later related:

'I took it down the corridor and gave it to him because it had reached the stage now when Rosalind was going to leave, so she suggested that I go down the corridor and give this beautiful structure B pattern, this photo 51, to Maurice. Maurice couldn't believe it when I offered it to him. He couldn't believe that I hadn't stolen it from her desk. He didn't think that she could ever offer him something as interesting as this.' (5)

Wilkins then recognized what he was looking at and in January 1953 James Watson came to their laboratory at Kings College to look at the photo (6) and later related how:

‘The instant I saw the picture my mouth fell open and my pulse began to race.’ (7)

This then helped lead – although its influence is highly contested since Crick had already hypothesized what Gosling’s photo showed - to Watson and Crick’s seminal 1953 paper and thereafter to their being awarded the Nobel Prize in 1962.

The attempt to claim that Watson and Crick ‘stole’ their discovery from Franklin via Wilkins is simply ludicrous as there was nothing wrong with the transfer of the data (Photograph 51) from Gosling to Wilkins (8) and as we’ve seen Gosling has openly stated that Franklin told him to take his data to Wilkins. (9) This the core element of the pro-Franklin claim alongside weird speculative claims that ‘she’d have cracked it given time’ like that made by Brian Sutton who writes:

‘Well, it’s difficult to say but one reason is probably that Rosalind had chosen to focus her attention on her X-ray photos of a less hydrated ‘A’ form of DNA. This form appeared to show much more information and she hoped to calculate the structure directly, rather than build models. In fact, these photos of the ‘A’ form had revealed a key piece of information, namely that the two strands of DNA ran in opposite directions. Neither Rosalind nor the others had appreciated this, until Francis Crick realised its significance just before building the final model.

She didn’t turn her attention to Photo 51 until early in 1953. You can see from her notebooks that once she did concentrate on it, she gleaned all the key information about the structure from it. I fully believe that given more time she would have cracked the structure. She was so close. Watson was surprised that she accepted the correctness of their model immediately upon seeing it. It must have been because she could see that it fitted so well with all of her evidence.’ (10)

In other words: Franklin made a mistake and handed Photograph 51 – which remember she didn’t actually take – to Wilkins who showed it to Watson which confirmed what Crick had already suggested, but we are supposed to believe that Franklin’s work – that wasn’t actually her work but rather Gosling’s – was ‘stolen’ along with the credit and ‘she would have eventually gotten there’.

This is just nonsensical special pleading as even Sutton admits that it was Crick who sorted out the truth about what Photograph 51 showed not Franklin.

The desperate lunacy of the ‘it was stolen from Franklin by Wilkins, Watson and Crick’ claim is well demonstrated by an exchange quoted by Kerri Smith in ‘Nature’ in 2019:

‘Melinda Baldwin

So, Rosalind Franklin was working with Maurice Wilkins but the two of them had a pretty bad working relationship. Apparently, Franklin thought that she was being brought to King’s College London as an independent investigator who would be in charge of her own research. Wilkins thought that she was being brought in as an assistant, and eventually the relationship grew so fraught that Franklin stopped showing him her data, and she was planning on moving to Birkbeck College. Somehow, Wilkins got a copy of photo 51.

Raymond Gosling

I took it down the corridor and gave it to him because it had reached the stage now when Rosalind was going to leave, so she suggested that I go down the corridor and give this beautiful structure B pattern, this photo 51, to Maurice. Maurice couldn’t believe it when I offered it to him. He couldn’t believe that I hadn’t stolen it from her desk. He didn’t think that she could ever offer him something as interesting as this. He’d only had it for two or three days when Watson chipped up.

Melinda Baldwin

He showed it to James Watson when James came down to visit him and to chat a little bit about DNA.

Raymond Gosling

Who of course knew what a helical diffraction pattern would look like because Crick had two years previously published a theoretical paper of what the diffraction pattern of a helix would look like.’ (11)

Here we have Melinda Baldwin trying to tell the man who took Photograph 51 – Raymond Gosling – ‘what happened’ and Gosling correcting her claims.

Similarly, we read Gosling correcting both Baldwin and another pro-Franklin writer Georgina Ferry on this nonsense:

‘Georgina Ferry

So, it was pretty out of order for Watson and Crick to start working on DNA because they knew full well that Maurice Wilkins was working on it at King’s and subsequently Rosalind Franklin joined him there and she was also working on it. But it was King’s’ problem, and there was very much a sort of unspoken gentleman’s agreement – it would be understood that a particular group or lab was working on one problem and you wouldn’t then go and do that one.

Raymond Gosling

You didn’t go to work on another man’s problem, especially if he’d got a whole team working on it.

Melinda Baldwin

In the Watson and Crick paper, it’s not credited. Watson and Crick say they were stimulated by a general knowledge of the unpublished results of Wilkins and Franklin.

Voice of Nature: John Howe

We have been stimulated by a knowledge of the general nature of the unpublished experimental results and ideas of Dr Wilkins, Dr Franklin and…

Melinda Baldwin

But they don’t cite photo 51 specifically and then Franklin and Gosling, in their paper, say this photo clearly supports the model that Watson and Crick had put forth.

Raymond Gosling

Rosalind’s reaction was, I think, typical of Rosalind. She wasn’t furious or didn’t use the word ‘scooped’. What she actually said was we all stand on each other’s shoulders. We had this second-, third-prize feeling that we were within a millimetre or two of the right answer ourselves.

Melinda Baldwin

So, Watson and Crick had their paper ready to go. They had the structure solved. They wanted to publish it in Nature. Apparently, John Randall, the uber-head of the Kings College London Laboratory, was a member of The Athenaeum, the British social club in London, and so was L. J. F. Brimble, then one of the co-editors of Nature. So, apparently, Brimble approached Randall to say well, we’ve got this paper under consideration, don’t you want the King’s work represented as well? And I think Watson and Crick and Wilkins had already agreed that they would publish two papers side-by-side. Wilkins sort of knew that his work was going to be outshone by Watson and Crick, but he certainly wanted it published. And then apparently after the two of them had agreed to publish the two papers together, Rosalind Franklin said, well, I want a paper on the crystallographic work that Ray Gosling and I did in there as well, and so it was really by conversation by the editors and the heads of the laboratories that the editors agreed to print these paper as quickly as possible. So, famously, the three DNA papers were not peer-reviewed. I think that was quite typically for the Brimble-and-Gale editorship, that they placed a lot of trust in particular laboratory heads and particular friends in the British scientific community and so if Laurence Bragg said that something was good and important, they were going to print it.’ (12)

Notice that both Baldwin and Ferry don’t actually make arguments but rather aspersions from either fake moralistic nonsense like ‘it was pretty out of order for Watson and Crick’ to work on DNA – one wonders why or was Franklin the only one allowed to work on it in Ferry’s mind? – or aspersions like ‘somehow, Wilkins got a copy of photo 51’ from Baldwin (meant to imply there was some wrong doing on Wilkins’ part) despite her knowing precisely how this occurred because Gosling gave it to him at Franklin’s suggestion – and they end up with basically a ‘sexist conspiracy’ by Wilkins, Watson and Crick against Franklin a-la Anne Sayre’s desperate and long debunked attempt to argue this her 1975 book ‘Rosalind Franklin and DNA’. (13)

So, in summary then there is absolutely no argument that Rosalind Franklin – and thus jews – discovered DNA nor was it because of Rosalind Franklin because she didn’t even take the famous photograph 51: Raymond Gosling did!

References

(1) https://www.jinfo.org/Biomedical_Research.html

(2) https://www.londonremembers.com/subjects/rosalind-franklin

(3) Anon., 2013, ‘Due Credit’, Nature, Vol. 496, No. 270 (https://www.nature.com/articles/496270a)

(4) https://www.ukri.org/blog/from-the-archive-rosalind-franklins-famous-photo-51/

(5) Kerri Smith, 2019, ‘PastCast: The other DNA papers’, Nature (https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-01347-8)

(6) Brenda Maddox, 2003, ‘Rosalind Franklin: The Dark Lady of DNA’, 1st Edition, HarperCollins: London, p. 196

(7) James Watson, 1968, ‘The Double Helix’, 1st Edition, Atheneum: London, p. 167

(8) Maddox, Op. Cit., p. 196

(9) Smith, Op. Cit.

(10) https://www.ukri.org/blog/from-the-archive-rosalind-franklins-famous-photo-51/

(11) Smith, Op. Cit.

(12) Ibid.

(13) Cf. Anne Sayre, 1975, ‘Rosalind Franklin and DNA’, 1st Edition, W. W. Norton: New York