Essay On Photo 51

Photo 51 pertains to an X-ray crystallography image of the structure of DNA. It was obtained at King’s College, London by Raymond Gosling, who was at that time a PhD student under the supervision of biophysicist Rosalind Franklin. The image is widely regarded as one of the foundations of molecular biology and lies at the center of much controversy about ethics in the scientific community, sexism, and numerous allegations.
During the early 1950s, the structure of DNA had not yet been determined. The double-helix structure was first proposed by James Watson and Francis Crick, who formulated a model based on data from other laboratories, particularly from Franklin and Gosling’s diffraction data. The model they proposed showed DNA to be composed of two antiparallel strands that wound around each other, with the backbone being composed of sugar and phosphate, and the four nucleotide bases pair together specifically (A to T and C to G) inside the helix. Watson and Crick received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1962, along with their close colleague Maurice Wilkins for their collective work on nucleic acids, four years after the death of Franklin.
Photo 51 can be perceived as a symbolic representation of the controversies surrounding Watson, Crick, Wilkins, and Franklin. First and foremost was the seemingly lack of acknowledgement by Watson and Crick regarding Franklin’s data, which was evidently crucial in the development of their DNA model. The seemingly cold attitudes towards Franklin by Watson and Wilkins also led to allegations of sexism, as complicated by the negative descriptions of Franklin in Watson’s book entitled “The Double Helix.” There had also been tension between Wilkins and Franklin, as Wilkins thought Franklin was hired with the intention of being his assistant, when they were in fact colleagues, as their director had not communicated well with both of them. Watson had admitted that his early and strongly negative impressions of Franklin were influenced by his friendship with Wilkins, who had also been studying DNA for a number of years. The manner by which Franklin’s data had reached Watson and Crick was also subjected to criticism.
Franklin’s contribution to the discovery of the structure of DNA had since been acknowledged by many, with Watson suggesting that Franklin would have received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Wilkins. However, the Nobel Prize cannot be awarded posthumously. Nonetheless, Franklin’s contributions to molecular work in general had not been left unnoticed.