Saturday, May 05, 2007

DNA discrimination?

I was doing research on the topic of DNA and I was surprised to discover that it appears the two main people credited with the discovery of DNA, James Watson and Francis Crick, may have been influenced by previous work done by Rosalind Franklin. To the point that she should have received more credit for the discovery of DNA. It's felt by many that part of the reason this happened was during the 1950's women were discriminated against when it came to science. While it appears Watson gave more credit to Franklin as well as others did after she died, during her lifetime and still in some textbooks, she is not well known for this.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

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Hooda Thunkit (Dave Zawodny) said...

The discrimination of female scientists was indeed an ugly reality of the times.

However more enlightening posts such as yours can overcome this inequity, in time.

History can be corrected, but the original discrimination cannot :-(