The Woman Behind DNA Double Helix To Be Seen In a Biopic “Exposure” Spec By Entertainment One
It’s commonly believed that James Watson and Francis Crick discovered the double helix shape of DNA. But in fact, they based their work on one of their colleagues at King’s College in London – Rosalind Franklin, an x-ray diffraction expert whose images of DNA proteins in the early 1950s revealed a helix shape. It wasn’t until they saw Franklin’s work that Watson and Crick began hunting for the long, braided twist that turned out to be DNA’s true shape.
Franklin will be getting a biopic if spec script “Exposure”is made. Exposure is a spec script by Hayley Schore & Roshan Sethi. eOne features president Xavier Marchand prevailed in an auction that had studios in the competitive mix. ICM Partners and Stagecoach’s Steve Smith brokered the deal for the scribes and producers are already chasing this. Fingers crossed, because not only would a feature film bring Franklin some much-deserved recognition—her life would make for quite a dramatic movie.
Throughout her career, which ended tragically early, when she died of ovarian cancer in 1958 at age 37, she faced sexism at nearly every turn. The
fact that she was a woman didn’t just affect the way her work was received—it also meant, for example, that she couldn’t access certain “men’s only” spaces where she worked at King’s College in London. She also happened to be Jewish, which heightened prejudice against her.And yet the same prejudices that prevented her from entering the Common Room appear to have bled over into her colleagues’ views of her. Watson, who was in 2007 suspended from his research position for making sexist and racist comments, dismissed Franklin’s contributions to the discovery of DNA’s structure in his memoir The Double Helix. Many years later, both Watson and Crick admitted that they had been too dismissive of Franklin’s work, and that her discoveries were what led to their own.
There is now ample evidence from multiple sources that Franklin’s colleagues and graduate students at King’s College showed her x-ray images of DNA to Watson and Crick without her permission or knowledge. The so-called Photo 51 provided proof that DNA’s structure was probably a helix. Several witnesses – including Crick and Watson themselves – say that the two researchers saw this photo before “discovering” the double helix.
It’s hard for us to imagine now how such a thing could have happened. It’s almost as if there were a conspiracy to credit two “nice” men, instead of a Jewish woman, with the DNA discovery that revolutionized the twentieth century. In reality, it was probably rank prejudice combined with the same cutthroat scientific competitiveness that has dogged many great discoveries. For example, many historians argue that Alexander Graham Bell “stole” his telephone patent out from under another researcher – a robbery that’s arguably as great as the one that ripped the glory of the double helix discovery from Franklin’s hands.
Luckily Franklin’s contributions to science haven’t been erased from history. She may have suffered from an unfair lack of recognition in her lifetime, but her legacy lives on in both molecular biology and microscopy. The Royal Society offers an annual Rosalind Franklin Award, and there’s even a university named after her but movies about real-life female scientists are less common. Now that we’ll be getting Hidden Figures, about the African American women who were instrumental in building NASA’s space program, and maybe Exposure, too—it seems a welcome new trend may be emerging.
