But Dr. Perutz’s sharing of Dr. Franklin’s unpublished data is “somewhat dubious,” she said. (In 1969, Dr. Perutz wrote that the report was not confidential, but that he should have asked permission to share it “out of courtesy”.)
Still, other scientists and historians said they were puzzled by the arguments in the Nature essay. Helen Berman, a structural biologist at Rutgers University, called them “a little strange.” About dr. Franklin told them, “If she was an equal member, then I don’t know if she was treated very well.”
Dr. franklin and dr. Wilkins each published their own results in the same issue of Nature that also included Dr. Watson and Dr. Crick was included as part of a package of articles. But dr. Berman wondered why the scientists didn’t collaborate on a single paper with shared authorship. And several scholars said they thought the new essay minimized misconduct by the Cambridge team.
Dr. Comfort said he and Dr. Cobb did not “try to exonerate Dr. Watson and Dr. Crick”, who he said were “slow to fully acknowledge Dr. Franklin’s contribution”. Dr. Cobb said Cambridge scientists Dr. Franklin should have told them they were using her data. “They were discourteous,” he said. “They weren’t as open as they should have been.” But, he added, it was not “theft.”
There is no evidence that Dr. Franklin felt saddened by what happened, historians said, and she befriended the Cambridge duo in the last years of her short life. “As far as I know, there was no bad feeling,” said Dr. Oshinsky.
That might have changed if Dr. Franklin had lived long enough to read “The Double Helix,” several scholars noted. “‘The Double Helix’ is just awful,” said Dr. Garman. “It gives a very, very slanted view and doesn’t give her credit for the bits they even used of her.”
Dr. Franklin’s early death also meant she missed out on the Nobel Prize, but the Nobel Prize meeting could have found other ways to recognize her contribution, said Nils Hansson, a historian of medicine at Düsseldorf’s Heinrich Heine University, in Germany. Nor Dr. Watson nor Dr. Crick mentioned her as they received their awards, Dr. Hansson, although Dr. Wilkins, who also received the award, did.
“She really got a raw deal,” said Dr. Howard Markel, a physician and historian of medicine at the University of Michigan and the author of “The Secret of Life,” a book about the discovery of the double helix. “Everyone likes to be given proper credit for their work. Everyone must care enough about their colleagues to ensure the process of fair play.”