King's College DNA controversy

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King's College (London) DNA Controversy is a dispute about whether Rosalind Franklin was given proper credit for her contribution to the determination of the structure of DNA.

An enduring controversy has been generated by James D. Watson and Francis Crick's use of DNA X-ray diffraction data collected by Rosalind Franklin and Raymond Gosling. The controversy arose from claims that some of the data were shown to them, without her knowledge, by her estranged colleague, Maurice Wilkins, and by Max Perutz^[1]. Her experimental results provided estimates of the water content of DNA crystals and these results were consistent with the two sugar-phosphate backbones being on the outside of the molecule. Franklin personally told Crick and Watson that the backbones had to be on the outside. Her identification of the space group for DNA crystals revealed to Crick that the two DNA strands were antiparallel. The X-ray diffraction images collected by Gosling and Franklin provided the best evidence for the helical nature of DNA. Franklin's superb experimental work thus proved crucial in Watson and Crick's discovery.

In 1951, Franklin had presented some of her experimental findings for DNA at a public seminar to which Watson had been invited by Wilkins. Crick was given permission by his boss, Perutz, to read an internal MRC report containing those experimental findings. Wilkins let Watson view one of the better "B form" X-ray diffraction images collected by Gosling and Franklin. Franklin had made an agreement with Wilkins that he could work on the B form while she would concentrate her efforts on the A form.

The strangely informal nature of the interactions between Watson and Crick in the Cavendish Laboratory at the University of Cambridge in England and Wilkins and Franklin in London at King's College London arose from several sources. Watson was an active correspondent within Max Delbrück's "Phage Group". Members of this distributed group were devoted to exploration of the physical nature of genes and their group promoted a free exchange of unpublished information. Wilkins had originally worked with Gosling on DNA and felt that he should have been able to collaborate with Franklin when she started working with Gosling on DNA^[2]. Franklin was cold to the idea of collaboration with Wilkins^[2]. Another important element of the interactions between the Cambridge and London researchers was that Watson and Crick were in favor of trying an approach to solving the structure of DNA that neither Franklin nor Wilkins felt comfortable with.

The position taken by Watson and Crick was that the data from King's College should be used as a basis for molecular model construction, a view that conflicted with Franklin's view that the structure should be revealed by careful calculations. In the year leading up to the discovery of the double helix, Wilkins and Franklin had both refused to participate in the kind of molecular model building that was advocated by Watson and Crick. It was the Watson and Crick approach that eventually led to their discovery of the structure.

Prior to publication of the double helix structure, Watson and Crick had little interaction with Franklin. Crick and Watson felt that they had benefitted from collaborating with Wilkins. They offered him a co-authorship on the article that first described the double helix structure of DNA. Wilkins turned down the offer and was in part responsible for the terse character of the acknowledgement of experimental work done at King's College. Rather than make any of the DNA researchers at King's College co-authors on the Watson and Crick double helix article, the solution that was arrived at was to publish two additional papers from King's College along with the helix paper. Brenda Maddox suggested that because of the importance of her work to Watson and Crick's model building, Franklin should have had her name on the original Watson and Crick manuscript^[3].

After the discovery of the DNA double helix, Franklin became friends with both Watson and Crick, and spent her last period of remission from ovarian cancer in Crick's house (Franklin died in 1958)^[4].

[edit] References

^ Chapter 3 of The Eighth Day of Creation: Makers of the Revolution in Biology by Horace Freeland Judson published by Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press (1996) ISBN 0-87969-478-5.
^ ^a ^b Wilkins, Maurice, The Third Man of the Double Helix
^ Rosalind Franklin: The Dark Lady of DNA by Brenda Maddox. (2002) ISBN 0-06-018407-8.
^ What Mad Pursuit: A Personal View of Scientific Discovery by Francis Crick (Basic Books reprint edition, 1990 ISBN 0-465-09138-5) and The Eighth Day of Creation: Makers of the Revolution in Biology by Horace Freeland Judson provide descriptions of Watson's and Crick's interactions with Wilkins and Franklin.