One sentence. Her hard work was STOLEN and they gave her one friggin sentence in the acknowledgement section. Meanwhile they’re riding the cash cow to fame and glory, heralded as these biological geniuses.
It seems like textbooks have become more progressive in the past 5 years or so, but the biology textbook I was issued in high school (published in the early 2000s) dedicated a small, 2-3 sentence paragraph to Rosalind Franklin (which mostly focused on explaining what X-ray crystallography was, not focusing on her contribution or Watson and Crick’s theft of her experimental data), while Watson and Crick received an entire full page spread with their iconic photograph, posing next to a giant DNA model. The most recent version of that textbook now has an entire page dedicated to Rosalind and even includes a picture of her, though!
(Pierce, B. 2012. Genetics: A Conceptual Approach. 4th ed.)
Watson and Crick took credit for Franklin’s work and got away with it because she was a woman. She couldn’t even be awarded the Nobel prize because she died as a result of the radiation from the very X-ray diffraction techniques she used to discover the structure of DNA. Women were not taken seriously in science back then and even still today there is a huge deficit of females in STEM fields.
My genetics professor dedicated a whole lecture to Rosalind Franklin, what she did, how it contributed, how it was stolen, who else contributed to the theft, and why it all shouldn’t have happened. He was a difficult professor for many reasons, but I’ve respected him loads for this.
My microbio teacher nearly didn’t mention her, and when called on it (by me) agreed in passing that she was important and that her information was relevent. I’ve respected him much less ever since. Oddly, he mentioned Fanny Hesse and her idea to include agar in microbiology plates.
