re: #6 FemNaziBitch

checkmate

Oh?

What about this? (From the Wikipedia article on Francis Crick)

Crick described what he saw as the failure of Maurice Wilkins and Rosalind Franklin to cooperate and work towards finding a molecular model of DNA as a major reason why he and Watson eventually made a second attempt to do so. They asked for, and received, permission to do so from both William Lawrence Bragg and Wilkins. In order to construct their model of DNA, Watson and Crick made use of information from unpublished X-ray diffraction images of Franklin’s (shown at meetings and freely shared by Wilkins), including preliminary accounts of Franklin’s results/photographs of the X-ray images that were included in a written progress report for the King’s College laboratory of Sir John Randall from late 1952.

It is a matter of debate whether Watson and Crick should have had access to Franklin’s results without her knowledge or permission, and before she had a chance to formally publish the results of her detailed analysis of her X-ray diffraction data which were included in the progress report. However, Watson and Crick found fault in her steadfast assertion that, according to her data, a helical structure was not the only possible shape for DNA—so they had a dilemma. In an effort to clarify this issue, Max Ferdinand Perutz later published what had been in the progress report,[36] and suggested that nothing was in the report that Franklin herself had not said in her talk (attended by Watson) in late 1951. Further, Perutz explained that the report was to a Medical Research Council (MRC) committee that had been created in order to “establish contact between the different groups of people working for the Council”. Randall’s and Perutz’s laboratories were both funded by the MRC.

It is also not clear how important Franklin’s unpublished results from the progress report actually were for the model-building done by Watson and Crick. After the first crude X-ray diffraction images of DNA were collected in the 1930s, William Astbury had talked about stacks of nucleotides spaced at 3.4 angstrm (0.34 nanometre) intervals in DNA. A citation to Astbury’s earlier X-ray diffraction work was one of only eight references in Franklin’s first paper on DNA.[37] Analysis of Astbury’s published DNA results and the better X-ray diffraction images collected by Wilkins and Franklin revealed the helical nature of DNA. It was possible to predict the number of bases stacked within a single turn of the DNA helix (10 per turn; a full turn of the helix is 27 angstrms [2.7 nm] in the compact A form, 34 angstrms [3.4 nm] in the wetter B form). Wilkins shared this information about the B form of DNA with Crick and Watson. Crick did not see Franklin’s B form X-ray images (Photo 51) until after the DNA double helix model was published.[38]

She did not herself come up with the Watson-and-Crick double helix.

Just because Watson was politically incorrect doesn’t mean that he had nothing to do with the discovery of the double helix. Much less that Crick had nothing to do with it either, and that the real work was done by Franklin.