Wilkins produced the initial samples, trained Gosling (who took photo 51) and then had his samples and assistant (Gosling) taken when the high flying Franklin was hired.
Wilkins took lower quality photos before Franklin was even in the lab, and showed them to Watson at a conference.
Yes, Franklin built a way better x-ray camera.
But she was also allegedly pretty horrid to Wilkins. She mocked Wilkins as a "middle class" idiot and refused to share her data with him (Gosling did show Wilkins photo 51 when ordered by higher ups, which Gosling had taken, we don't talk about Gosling because PhD students don't get credit right?).
Franklin held a funeral for the double helix, because I guess she thought Wilkins was an idiot to suggest DNA was a double helix.
Yeah, Wilkins was a little bit rude, giving as little credit to her as possible. But if some privileged upper-class rockstar moves into your lab, tries to freeze you out, mocks you for your theory, then you figure out you can prove your theory is correct (using a photo your former assistant took using the rockstar's camera, and some help from a couple of other researchers) then yeah ... are you really going out of your way to praise them, even if maybe they could have eventually figured it out?
People do look a bit funny at Watson though ... he apparently became a bit of a crackpot in later years.
I believe Franklin would have shared the Nobel prize with Watson and Crick had she not died before she could be nominated. The Nobel committee just don't offer posthumous prizes. That compounds the problem of Watson and KCL minimising her contribution. But if she had survived, I'm confident there would've been a huge dust-up as to whether she or Wilkins got third spot on the Nobel prize. As she was already dead before the DNA structure was confirmed, history couldn't go that way.
It's misattribution of causality. She wasn't nominated because she was dead and she suffered academic sexism, chauvinism and skullduggery, especially from Watson. It's not that she wasn't nominated because of academic sexism, chauvinism and skullduggery.
Are you one of these people?
https://www.dictionary.com/browse/fortuitous
> Many object to the use of fortuitous to mean simply “fortunate” and insist that it should be limited to its original sense of “accidental.” In modern standard use, however, fortuitous almost always carries the senses both of accident or chance and luck or fortune. It is infrequently used in its sense of “accidental” without the suggestion of good luck, and even less frequently in the sense “lucky” without at least a suggestion of accident or chance
In any case, neither of these words is the right choice in the context of the previous comment. A word like "incredible" or "unlikely" or "amazing" would more clearly express the idea.
I disagree. Fortuitous/fortunate/lucky/convenient all work better.
Compare the usage of "luckily" in this quote from The Naked Gun 2½: The Smell of Fear:
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0102510/quotes/?item=qt0434008
> Commissioner Anabell Brumford: Ladies and gentlemen, I would now like to introduce a most special American. Tonight, he is being honoured for his 1000th drug-dealer killed.
> Lt. Frank Drebin: [to applause] Thank you. But, in all honesty, the last three I backed over with my car. Luckily, they turned out to be drug-dealers.
Here, "luckily" gives the dark implication that the police covered up Drebin's killing of three people by posthumously framing them as drug-dealers... and maybe the other 997 people as well. "Luckily" is nicely understated where "amazingly" would be too obvious, and "incredibly" doesn't work at all.
But "so fortuitous a coinicidence" is redundant and confusing; it means, basically, "so coincidental a coincidence".
I read through these once. For those where I've been in the wrong, it's two patterns repeating. Either that I learned something in school / as a kid, and it was "correct" at the time but now we know better. Or that the common belief has just always been wrong.
Examples include that "glass is liquid", "bulls hate red", "touching a baby bird will make the mother abandon it", "you only taste salt on part X of your tongue" etc.
I've never believe that one. I have sometimes eaten a little bit of salt in the form of grains and it was completely obvious that I could taste the salt all over the top of the tongue.
I cannot for the life of me understand how anybody ever came to believe something like that.
It's not like modern people don't have plentiful access to cheap salt, sugar, citrus/lime juice, etc.
> "glass is liquid"
This one makes a lot more sense but the belief that old glass panes in windows are thicker at the bottom because glass is liquid rather than it being an obvious consequence of the manufacturing method -- blow a glass bubble and cut it up and flatten the pieces -- also seems insane to me. It's on the level of Americans believing rail gauges are derived from the width of Roman carts and refusing to accept that people used (and still use) many different rail gauges.
While it's fair to say that she contributed more (EDIT: Crick actually developed a lot of the mathematical theory which Franklin herself used so I'm not decided) than Watson/Crick (phosphates on the outside, precise helix and double helix measurements), and that her contributions were minimized at the time, she did not solve the DNA structure herself, and she certainly didn't do it alone. There are many others who made large contributions to this project and whose names are totally unknown to the average person. She was acknowledged by Watson/Crick and her work was published in the same issue of Nature - nobody could be unaware of her contributions. Watson later tried to rewrite history with himself at the center and was widely panned, even at the time.
No it won't lol, it already isn't. Source: attended school. When there is a political will, there is a way
Which is how we ended up with a famous electric car company named after Tesla, whereas Edison was far more involved with the type and contributed to battery technology for EVs of the day.