I think that the hullaballoo about Rosie Franklin is really getting out of hand. Fucking Watson himself wrote in The Double Helix:
In 1958, Rosalind Franklin died at the early age of thirty-seven. Since my initial impressions of her, both scientific and personal (as recorded in the early pages of this book), were often wrong, I want to say something here about her achievements. The X-ray work she did at King's is increasingly regarded as superb. The sorting out of the A and B forms, by itself, would have made her reputation; even better was her 1952 demonstration, using Patterson superposition methods, that the phosphate groups must be on the outside of the DNA molecule. Later, when she moved to Bemal's lab, she took up work on tobacco mosaic virus and quickly extended our qualitative ideas about helical construction into a precise quantitative picture, definitely establishing the essential helical parameters and locating the ribonucleic chain halfway out from the central axis.
Because I was then teaching in the States, I did not see her as often as did Francis, to whom she frequently came for advice or when she had done something very pretty, to be sure he agreed with her reasoning. By then all traces of our early bickering were forgotten, and we both came to appreciate greatly her personal honesty and generosity, realizing years too late the struggles that the intelligent woman faces to be accepted by a scientific world which often regards women as mere diversions from serious thinking. Rosalind's exemplary courage and integrity were apparent to all when, knowing she was mortally ill, she did not complain but continued working on a high level until a few weeks before her death.
Yes, he wrote it back in 1968. So lets just stop with the "poor forgotten Rosie". I mean Watson himself mentioned her often in his book, and wrote those paragraphs (amongs others) about her. Yes, she was right and she was a good experimentalist. Nobody forgot about her, expect idiots who don't read books. Double Helix is less than a 100 pages long, and is an easy read. How much simpler could it be to read about it all from a first-hand account? Anyone who has anything but the most passing interest in the history of determination of DNA's structure would have heard about her! It's in fact hard to miss her.
For everyone who doesn't know what's going on with R.F. these days: full-retard pseudo-feminists got a hold of her and are using her memory for their own devices. Fuck them.
