Question 1

Was Rosalind Franklin's work stolen?

Accepted Answer

The truth is more complicated than either the heroic or the dismissive version, and the honest answer is that **her data was used without her knowledge or consent** — which is a serious matter regardless of whether it meets the definition of theft.

**What she did.** A crystallographer of exceptional technical skill, she produced X-ray diffraction images of DNA at King's College London of a quality nobody had achieved, including the celebrated **Photograph 51**. Her analysis had established that DNA had a helical structure with the phosphate backbone on the outside, and she had determined key measurements.

**What happened.** **Maurice Wilkins** showed Photograph 51 to **James Watson** without Franklin's knowledge. Separately, an unpublished report containing her measurements, prepared for a Medical Research Council committee, reached **Francis Crick** through the committee — not confidential in a formal sense, and not something she had made available to competitors.

Watson later described the effect of seeing the photograph as immediate: its features indicated the helical structure and its dimensions directly.

**Why it matters.** Watson and Crick's model was built substantially on data they obtained without asking, and their 1953 paper acknowledged her work only in a general note about having been stimulated by unpublished results — **which did not convey that her data was essential to the model**.

**What is unfair to say:**

**That she did not understand her own data.** Her notebooks show she was progressing toward the structure, and the once-common claim that she was hostile to the helical model is not supported.

**That she was denied the Nobel Prize** because of discrimination. She **died in 1958**, aged 37, of ovarian cancer, and the prize was awarded in 1962 — it is not awarded posthumously. The relevant question is whether she would have shared it had she lived, and the prize's limit of three recipients makes that genuinely uncertain.

**What is fair to say:** the norms of attribution were breached; her contribution was understated for decades; and the environment at King's was difficult for her in ways contemporaries recorded.

**Her later work** on virus structure was significant and is frequently overlooked entirely.

Question 2

Who was Dorothy Hodgkin?

Accepted Answer

A British chemist who used X-ray crystallography to determine the three-dimensional structures of biologically critical molecules — including penicillin, vitamin B12 and insulin — and who remains the

Question 3

Who was Clair Patterson?

Accepted Answer

The geochemist who established the age of the Earth and then spent decades fighting the lead industry to get lead out of petrol — a career that is one of the clearest illustrations of how

Question 4

Did Marie Curie really carry radium around in her pocket?

Accepted Answer

Yes. By her own account she kept tubes of radium and polonium in her pocket and in her desk drawer, and enjoyed looking at them glowing faintly in the dark laboratory at night. The dangers of

Question 5

Who was Jocelyn Bell Burnell?

Accepted Answer

The astrophysicist who discovered pulsars in 1967 as a graduate student, and who was excluded from the Nobel Prize awarded for the discovery — a case that became a reference point in debates about

Question 6

Did Benjamin Franklin fly a kite in a thunderstorm?

Accepted Answer

He said he did, but the account is thinner than its fame suggests, and historians have raised serious doubts. What the record contains. Franklin published a brief description of a proposed kite

Question 7

Could Anastasia have survived?

Accepted Answer

No — and this is one of the few historical mysteries that has been definitively closed, by DNA evidence, after decades in which it was genuinely open. The original uncertainty. The Romanov family

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