Misogyny: women of science are not pitiful – 06/05/2023 – Marcelo Leite

There are many ways to demean women who gain success and recognition in male-dominated environments such as scientific research. One of them consists of portraying them as poor people, sponsored or victims of malicious men.

Malevolence and macho maneuvers exist, in spades. But that doesn’t mean that every woman of prominence reached the top, or was prevented from reaching it, by male interference.

Minister Cármen Lúcia made this very clear, in a session of the TSE, in the sentence she applied to her companion Kassio Nunes Marques. The minister had spoken of the “abandonment” of female candidates by their parties, and Cármen Lúcia was vocal.

“I understand when Your Excellency says, in a way that sounds almost paternal, that it is necessary to have empathy”, condescended the minister. And she sent this: “When people say that the party abandoned it, as it used to be said that the husband abandoned it, poor thing… We don’t want to be poor things, we want to be equal citizens.”

In the research universe, there are many stories of women whose accomplishments were diminished, hidden, or did not receive due recognition. One of the most famous is that of Rosalind Franklin, co-discoverer of the structure of the DNA molecule, who would have been wronged by the history of science.

A physical chemist and expert in X-ray crystallography, she made a decisive contribution to James Watson and Francis Crick arriving at the double helix model. However, only the two men are authors of the 1953 article in the journal Nature that introduced the iconic figure to the world.

In the version that became fixed, Franklin would have been betrayed by Maurice Wilkins. His colleague at King’s College, he would have shown Watson, from the Cavendish Laboratory, the famous image 51 of Franklin, without his consent, and with the X-ray plate the riddle would have been solved.

In 1962, Watson and Crick (W&C) won the Nobel Prize for unlocking the structure, sharing it with Wilkins, not Franklin. That was enough for the version that the researcher had been wronged to prosper.

Few people know that in the same issue of Nature there were three articles related to DNA. W&C’s, of course, but also one by Wilkins and one by Franklin, signed with other collaborators. Or that the researcher never profiled herself as harmed, or even that she became close friends with the couple Odile and Francis Crick.

Nor does it highlight the fact that W&C admits in their article that they were stimulated by her and Wilkins’ results and general ideas. It is rarely mentioned that the Nobel is never conferred posthumously (Franklin had died of cancer in 1958, aged 37).

In Nature on April 25th, the 70th anniversary of the double helix, Matthew Cobb and Nathaniel Comfort, biographers of Crick and Watson, respectively, presented new documents and elements to undo the narrative of poor Franklin. It’s worth reading.

According to historians, she never complained because she knew about the traffic of information between King’s and Cavendish. Even more: she would not have conceived the double helix only because she did not apply herself as a W&C to assembling three-dimensional models of the molecule, with numerous corrected versions in the light of information that Franklin, Wilkins and other scientists contributed.

Failure to portray Franklin as a victim in no way diminishes this researcher’s brilliant career, in a time and environment averse to women, nor her real contribution to unraveling the DNA molecule. It just makes it bigger.

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