#Crystallography
Crystallography is notoriously hard, and she was *very* good at it.
November 7, 2025 at 9:27 PM
Rosalind Franklin. Just leaving her name here because she should have been considered part of the discovery, but she died in part due to radiation exposure (DNA structure was discovered through x-ray crystallography). She collected the primary data. Watson himself admitted it ('The Double Helix')
November 7, 2025 at 8:15 PM
Watson was an opportunist. He took advantage of Crick’s command of crystallography and managed to get access to Franklin’s experimental data including the famous Photography 51 which reveal a simple cross-like diffraction pattern of DNA in high humidity.

15/41
November 8, 2025 at 1:58 PM
Crick & Watson are usually the folks credited with discovering the double helix of DNA.
Rosalind Franklin did the x-ray crystallography that enabled that work. They stole it from her, and she died of cancer.
November 7, 2025 at 11:42 PM
Rosalind Franklin was accomplished, built her own x-ray crystallography equipment, had spent WW2 on groundbreaking nanoscopic studies of coal for the War Department

Watson’s memoir admits he saw women as prey (“au pair” he wrote) or “goddess” and “Rosalind was neither; worse, she was angry”
November 7, 2025 at 8:29 PM
Crick and Watson should have put Franklin as an author on their DNA structure paper in Nature because they only got the structure right by getting to look at her X-ray crystallography data. I believe Wilkins showed them the data without Franklin's approval but I could be wrong.
November 7, 2025 at 9:48 PM
Exactly. Just came here to say the same thing. Without her painstaking crystallography work and if Wilkins had not filched her photograph Crick & Watson would never have got that far so fast.
November 7, 2025 at 8:40 PM
This book greatly increased my interest in chemistry and biology and spurred a life-long interest in crystallography. I reread the book several times and starting trying to learn more about several aspects of the work.

5/41
November 8, 2025 at 1:58 PM
I see X-ray crystallography is the topic! Contact me for all your X-ray content. I did a postdoc in X-ray crystallography at Cambridge many years ago.

Although I was stationed in Durham because it was easier to get machine time there.
November 8, 2025 at 10:16 AM
Only have undergrad in bio but I loved history and yet hadn't heard Florence Bell who was important in the initial preps of DNA for crystallography for Cavendish lab. She got sidelined and no credit (they wouldn't grant her degree from Cambridge in the '30s!)

Heard about her on BBC program
BBC World Service - Discovery, Unstoppable: Florence Bell
How Florence Bell's work laid the foundation for a vital field of research - DNA
www.bbc.co.uk
November 8, 2025 at 6:37 AM
November 7, 2025 at 8:49 PM
This is a really neat webtool for crystallographic symmetry.

(switch on "Manage symmetry" > "complete elements" to get the full picture)

https://www.crystallify.com/

@strucbio #crystallography #structuralbiology
Crystallify
Interactive 3D visualization tool for crystallographic space groups
www.crystallify.com
November 6, 2025 at 10:48 AM
they broke into Rosalind Franklin's lab and looked at her x-ray crystallography... so he was straight up thief
November 7, 2025 at 9:23 PM
Watson was a terrible racist sexist bigot. He was not a genius. He profited enormously off of x-ray crystallography work on the structure of DNA done by Rosalind Franklin and then didnt give her nearly enough credit for it.

He’s simply totally wrong that ppl with darker skin are less intelligent.
James Watson Is Auctioning Off His Nobel Prize. Please Do Not Bid on It.
Jim Watson is one of the most important scientists of the 20th century. He is also a peevish bigot. History will remember him for his co-discovery of...
slate.com
November 7, 2025 at 9:29 PM
Then she wasn't allowed to share the Nobel Prize because she died of ovarian cancer before it was awarded - if I had to guess, her cancer was probably caused by doing all of the X-ray crystallography work that Crick and Watson's "little paper" rested on almost entirely.
November 8, 2025 at 3:38 AM
As a former crystallography student, it gives me great pleasure to see Wegmans experimenting with more dense packing layouts for bottled water.

When I was a student, we had a homework assignment about the most efficient packing method for soda cans!
November 8, 2025 at 6:32 PM
I made this gift with the river closest to where a friend's baby was born.💙 Perhaps a coincidence, but the water art colours seem to beautifully match the decor in the baby's room
ko-fi.com/i/II3I11O2039

#art #river #baby #water #crystallography #mindfulness
November 7, 2025 at 2:53 PM
he was far from a genius and he gets no passes. Crick was much more talented and accomplished, as was Rosalind Franklin whose crystallography images they took without permission and without which their “discovery” would have been impossible.
November 7, 2025 at 9:12 PM
Turns out it was too big and hence a complex mix of crystal forms. Useless for crystallography. Colleague was furious.

He was grumpy for weeks.

Taught me a lesson. If you have anything at all (a crystal) it might be enough. A good crystal might be up to 1mm. More than that, probs forget it.
November 8, 2025 at 12:52 AM
An expert in x-ray crystallography, Rosalind Franklin led the team that created what has been called "arguably the most important photo ever taken," the celebrated Photo 51, which revealed the helical structure of DNA. #RosalindFranklin #NobelLaureate *at the very least
November 9, 2025 at 2:15 PM
A bit more complex. Franklin explicitly refused to work with them because she was trying to solve the same problem. But her PI Maurice Wilkins showed the conclusive crystallography images to Watson (taken by her student Gosling), which she was unable to interpret.
November 9, 2025 at 9:29 AM
As far as I know he did not literally steal them but heard Franklin lecture about her work and was then shown the crystallography by Maurice Wilkins without Franklin's permission.
November 7, 2025 at 8:35 PM
A bit of an #outreach win today - orders from Flinders Island, a remote island off the coast of Tasmania, for both a Crystal Explorer Kit (for their primary students) and an Elements Set (for their secondary students)! #elementsets #crystallography #ozchem #BraggYourPattern
November 4, 2025 at 12:57 AM