Watson may not have been the nicest scientist, but many people made wrong conclusions back then. Most famous is Linus Pauling's triple helix suggestion.
https://scarc.library.oregonstate.edu/coll/pauling/dna/narra...
The article here makes it sound as if Watson and Crick failed completely and were solely leeches on Franklin. Now you can state that there was a mistreatment by Watson and Crick with regards to Franklin, but the article suggests that she made the ground-breaking suggestions. But then why did she not write an article earlier? Yes, you can say that the health was poor and this may have delayed her analysis - but by the same token you can say the article inflates her own contributions with regards to the dsDNA helix.
> Science historian Alistair Sponsel of the Science History Institute and crystallographer Brian Sutton of KCL argue Franklin knew the earlier photo had revealed a helix
That in itself was not an insight at all. See Pauling's triple helix. Conclusion Pauling would have made the correct prediction eventually, he was a genius, but at that time he failed (and if I recall correctly he did not have access to Franklin's data, at the least I seem to remember that, e. g. Watson and Crack had access to the data due to a third guy who was also near or on the campus site; I don't rememeber where Pauling was, but he was probably not "in the close loop" right there, at that time).
And, if I also recall correctly, the helix theory was already proposed before that. I don't remember where I read it, so it could be wrong, but I think older scientific articles or books mentioned it or speculated about. At the least I am almost 100% certain that neither Franklin, Watson, Crick, Pauling etc... were the first to make such a proposal. Phoebus Levene made some suggestions too, even if wrong, you can see that people were getting closer to the puzzle and I think someone else too. But anyway, people will probably only remember Watson and Crick here and I think it is still deservedly so. Nobody says that these two were the only contributors ever.
> photograph 49, showing she made extensive notes about it despite a cosmetic defect. She recognized it suggested a helical structure and used it to calculate, for the first time, the length of each turn in the spiral—34 angstroms—and the number of bases “per turn of helix (if there is a helix).”
Ok, but you can make any local notes. These are not as useful as publishing a "it has not escaped our attention" article.
> No wonder Franklin recorded little in her notes about photograph 51, Sponsel and Sutton argue. She saw no need to repeat herself. Franklin “knows exactly what’s in front of her,” says Betty Smocovitis, a science historian at the University of Florida and co-editor of the Journal of the History of Biology.
No, I don't think so. If she would have had that as an insight, it would have solved many things, just as Crick and Watson did reason about in their own article. So perhaps she was slow. Or she did not figure out the implication; it's difficult to say.
> The flawed image was good enough to reveal key details of the helix to Franklin. But she did not think it was good enough to publish.
You can find billion reasons as to why you don't want to publish. Whatever the reasons, even if one thinks Crick and Watson were sneaky, she was slower. It seems to me as if many do post-analysis from the point of view "everyone was so unfair to her". That is understandable but that's not how science works.
> The reason, they say, is that Franklin was trying to understand different forms of the molecule before publishing
Sorry, that's garbage. Or worded differently, perhaps Crick understood biology better than Franklin did. In fact, I think Crick was smarter than Watson too - no clue why Watson is so praised in the USA.
> Sutton says he understands why she spent months on it, quipping, “I’m a crystallographer, so I want data-rich photos. I can’t do much with a photograph that only has six spots on it.”
Apparently Crick could, so ... and he was correct as well. I am finding these excuses not good here. They seem to come more from the point of view of how unfair life is.
> It was almost a year before she resumed puzzling out the structure of wet DNA.
Well. Crick and Watson did not wait a year.
> But by then Watson and Crick, drawing in part on Franklin’s data, were busy building the metal ball-and-stick model that would soon reveal the molecule’s full form and function.
That is objectively true - they took advantage of that and did not credit her more. No objection. But the "Franklin was the true discoverer" is also just incorrect. It can be debated how much Crick and Watson (also notice how the article prefers to name Watson first) contributed individually; personally I think Crick contributed more since he was smarter than Watson (and Pauling in turn was smarter than Crick, but he was more of a chemist than Crick, who clearly had more understanding of biology than Pauling had, see the central dogma by Crick, even if dogma is a misnomer and it had to be extended lateron) - the article really wants to change a narrative here. That's propaganda.
The only take-away that one could draw is that Franklin contributed more while also being about a step away from a very similar conclusion Crick and Watson made, but these two simply were faster. That's simply an objective fact.