Comment by 8bitsrule
1 day ago
The question's not new. In the early 1900s, women could not become PhD astronomers. Yet two women (Payne with stellar composition and Leavitt with cosmic distances) made fundamental, essential contributions to the science. Credit mostly went to male astronomers. The same might be said of Franklin and DNA.
It was nearly a century before the stories of all of them were revealed to public history. That the discoverers were not all equally rewarded is unjustifiable.
With regards to Franklin and DNA: the credit went to Watson and Crick because they had the fundamental insight: that DNA is an antiparallel double helix (Franklin knew it was a helix, but not an antiparallel double helix, which is key to the function of DNA). That data was shared in a departmental seminar. Further, she is explicitly acknowledged in W&C '53, and further, is the author of the paper immediately following W&C. She was never qualified to win the prize.