25 Jul 2020
“Science, for me, gives a partial explanation for life. In so far as it goes, it is based on fact, experience, and experiment.” -Rosalind Franklin
The Nobel Prizes were first awarded in 1901 (119 years ago). Since then, keeping in mind the experimental sciences field, only 18 women have ever been awarded the Nobel prize in either physics (3 women), chemistry (5 women), or physiology/medicine (12 women), with one woman having taken two in separate fields (Marie Curie for Physics in 1903 and for Chemistry in 1911). Contrariwise, 587 men have been awarded the Nobel prize for these fields since 1901. Therefore, while I believe that the objectivity of science as a field prohibits the awards from becoming a “gender issue,” the large gap between 587 and 22 becomes a clear metric for the underrepresentation of women in science.
Keeping that in mind, on the 100th birth anniversary of Rosalind Franklin, I’d like to talk about who I consider the most underrepresented woman in science: she won no Nobel prize and is often omitted from our science textbooks altogether, but without her research, we may not have discovered the “secret of life,” or DNA, altogether.
To give you some perspective, Rosalind Franklin was an English chemist whose work with X-ray diffraction images of DNA enabled the discovery of DNA’s double-helix structure by Watson and Crick. However, Franklin was not awarded for her discovery – only Watson, Crick, and Maurice Wilkins, another colleague of Franklin’s, received 1962’s Nobel Prize for Physiology/Medicine for the discovery. While there have been several justifications for Franklin not being awarded the prize, including the corporate explanation that she was disqualified because she died four years earlier and Nobel prizes are only awarded to those who can collect them, would Franklin have been awarded even if she had been alive?
Personally, I don’t think so. The widespread sexism in the experimental sciences would have left her handicapped. For example, as part of her first-hand experiences, when she graduated from the University of Cambridge in 1941, women were not entitled to a degree award or considered full members of the institution at the time. History, too, was rooting against her: had she won, she would only have been the fourth woman scientist to ever receive a Nobel at the time, given the pre-existing sexist atmosphere. With that, how likely would it have been for her to receive the prize? She would have likely been overlooked even if she were alive, just as Jocelyn Bell Burnell was overlooked in 1974 as a Nobel prize candidate for her discovery of radio pulsars when her male supervisor was awarded.
Nevertheless, the goal of this post is not to crib or complain about Franklin’s lack of recognition – while Franklin not being given her due is one of the greatest failures of the scientific community, its occurrence also coerces the scientific community to reflect in terms of the present and the future: is science still breeding a culture of sexism? What can enabling more women in science achieve today? How many more opportunities are available to women today? How has society transformed since the times of Franklin?
Had Franklin lived longer, I say with no doubt that she would have won a Nobel prize at least once – her body of work within 37 years boasts as many achievements as two lifetimes, whether it be with the demonstration of RNA as a single-strand or the discovery of the structure of the tobacco mosaic virus, besides her work on the double-helix. So, this is an appeal to all potential women in science: keeping in mind Rosalind Franklin’s legacy, take an oath to combat sexism every step of the way and bridge that gap between 578 and 22.