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Care to elaborate? Specifically, is there any doubt about Watson's contribution to the discovery of the double helix structure?


Well since Rosalind Franklin did the majority of the work, yes.


By what metric do you measure her work and the work of Watson and Crick?


The fact that she did all of it, and Watson had a friend in the same department she was in let him know when she got her data so he could force his way in and threaten her until she showed it to him, then rush home to publish first? Then spent the rest of his career trash talking her after she died young?

My fellow biology grad students when I was in grad school starting in 2005 pretty universally regarded Watson as a waste of oxygen.


This is not an accurate summary of events. The Xray image helped but required spiral maths and modeling.

On forgotten people what about Raymond Gosling (Franklin's PhD student) who took the famous photo:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photo_51

Watson was shown Gosling's photo by Gosling new supervisor after transferring from under Franklin's supervision.


Nope, he is a man, nothing interesting here.


Please provide your sources.

Referencing your fellow students' ideology driven groupthink doesn't qualify as such.


Did Watson and his co-author fail to credit her in their paper? If they credited her, but the media failed to give her attention, it's not his fault.


It's been a ongoing conversation for years how Watson and Crick disregarded Franklin's work, with a lot of evidence to support it.

Crick also wrote some scathing letters to Watson about how he was being disingenuous in this particular book [0].

[0]: https://profiles.nlm.nih.gov/ps/access/SCBBKN.pdf


Yes, they failed to credit her: https://pubmed.gov/13054692

In his own book, Watson admitted he had seen her work before publishing his result.


They published their papers in the same issue of Nature. This is the standard way of giving credit to both.




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