Esther M. Zimmer Lederberg
Gender Discrimination: Rosalind Elsie Franklin

Esther M. Lederberg had to overcome gender discrimination as best she could. Esther M. Lederberg was not alone in this respect. Consider the emminent biochemist, Rosalind Franklin.

Many people believe that the Jewish scientist Rosalind Franklin should have also have won the Nobel for her work on DNA (that the Nobel Prize being awarded to James Watson, Francis Crick, and Maurice Wilkins was not properly accredited). Rosalind Franklin was considered by many as the world's leading expert with X-ray Diffraction and had already deduced that DNA had a helical conformation - used as a starting basis by Watson and Crick). Despite Watson's lack of known qualifications, it is Watson himself who felt his knowledge was superior to Franklin's, once Wilkins had explained Franklin's discovery to Watson behind Franklin's back.

One account tells of how there was a race between the teams of Wilkins and Franklin (King’s College, London) and Crick and Watson (Cambridge). Watson attended a lecture of Franklin’s and based on a rather unclear recollection of the facts she presented - while ‘critical of her lecture style and personal appearance’ - created a failed model of DNA. Franklin worked mostly alone (another story talks of how even when there was conversation amongst them, it was so patronising that she didn’t take it further), and didn’t want to publish her findings until more confident about her theory that DNA was helical. Wilkins grew frustrated and in January 1953, showed her results to Watson, without apparently her knowledge or consent. This account also quotes Wilkins as admitting, "I’m afraid we always used to adopt - let’s say, a patronizing attitude towards her."

Exactly how does gender discrimination show itself? There are certain persistent signs of gender discrimination, and they are:

1. The belief by men that they are "naturally" superior to women, thus "entitled" to certain privileges, such as lying, or stealing, or other self-serving acts or views. For example, a man feeling that he is superior, sans qualifications, to a woman with qualifications. Ill mannered, personal critcisms, such as dress, eating style, use of language or accent, skin color, cultural origin, etc.
2. When specific facts are required, the facts seem somehow to vaporize, are strangely lost or forgotten. The "genius", only person able and qualified to do something suddenly has lapses of memory. Citations seem to be forgotten. Discoveries confused. The only observations to support a paper or viewpoint become the person in question. Personality traits seem strangely out of place, inconsistent (an arrogant person who refuses to meet, let alone talk to the uneducated, is suddenly found hobnobing with clerks and salesmen).

When Watson and Crick published their paper on DNA in Nature in 1953, they made no acknowledgment beyond the statement: "We have also been stimulated by a knowledge of the general nature of the unpublished results and ideas of Dr. M.H.F. Wilkins, Dr. R.E. Franklin, and their co-workers at King’s College London."

In 1962 Watson, Crick and Wilkins together received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. In their Nobel lectures they cite 98 references, none are Franklin’s. Only Wilkins included her in his acknowledgments.

After Franklin's death, Watson and Crick made it abundantly clear in public lectures that they could not have discovered the structure of DNA without her work. Being identified as a dishonest person who has based his position upon gender discrimination can be uncomfortable.

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