The Belated International Women's Day Posting

Hey guys. I'm an idiot who never posted this on International Women's Day. However it is still March, thus it is still Women's History Month. So, we have to talk about a woman in STEM who all got credit stolen from her for her amazing discovery. Time to get extremely triggered by injustice:

Remember how you learned that Watson and Crick (James Watson and Francis Crick) discovered that DNA was a double helix structure? Well, what if I told you that they were not the people to originally discover this?

It's probably not surprising that Watson and Crick were not actually the discoverers of this extremely crucial piece of information within the world of biology, and that it was, instead, Rosalind Franklin who initially made the discovery. Rosalind Franklin was a British chemist who dedicated her life to understanding molecular structures of a plethora of things like DNA, RNA, graphite, and coal, and she utilized X-ray crystallography in order to do this. She only lived between the years of 1920 and 1958; however, she discovered a lot within her short time on Earth, including the DNA double helix, which was identified through an important image called Photo 51 (below).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photo_51

In 1952, only 6 years before Franklin's death, she and a PhD student of hers named Raymond Gosling took Photo 51 in the basement of the chemistry labs in the MRC biophysics department. This paved the way for the further discovery of the DNA double helix by Watson and Crick. Because of Franklin's and Gosling's work, James Watson, Francis Crick, and Maurice Wilkins shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in the year 1962 (only 4 years after Franklin's death). It has been recorded that Watson even address Franklin's work in the discovery; however, it was said that she didn't win the Nobel Prize in Chemistry because of a pre-1974 rule in which recipients could not win the prize unless they were alive at the time it was being given. Thus, Rosalind Franklin remains underrepresented for her accomplishments within the field of chemistry and help in the field of biology.

Rosalind Franklin is just one of the many women in STEM who were overlooked in their accomplishments. There have been so many women whose accomplishments within the world of STEM go completely unnoticed or are only noticed by the people willing to steal the credit away from them. Franklin's story, along with the rest, are testaments to the sole call to action that those within the world of STEM need to hear: allocate credit where it's due. Do better.

If you want to learn about more women who have been overlooked in their work in STEM, go to this link and read all about it.

Happy Women's History Month.