It's not in this article, but I have a vague recollection from other discussions that the actual x-ray diffraction image was taken by one of Franklin's graduate students.
> That is correct, it was Gosling. This whole "controversy" is so stupid.
Graduate students aren't cited for coming up with innovations - the controversy is valid, but for some reason, people keep finding reasons to maintain a heterodox opinion.
The images weren't even shared with Watson/Crick by Franklin but by someone else.
Twinlaw's father is a super famous electrical engineer, retired professor emeritus with hundreds of papers (often as first) published author.
Be careful asking him about anything "he's published" since the mid-90s — because he often won't know anything about the topic. Instead, some grad-student lists you first to draw publicity to his own subordinate PhD / thesis.
After inventing a monumental concept in EE microchip design, you can just sort of rest on your laurels, just because of your name recognition (with permission, of course).
But after myself dropping out of grad school, decades ago, I've shared many lazy whiskeys with former colleagues, contemplating the "what if"s of two traveled old men. I regret nothing but happily engaged laziness.
> Graduate students aren't cited for coming up with innovations
Nonsense.
> the controversy is valid,
No. You can see both publications right here [1]. Watson and Crick explicitly say they are aware of the "general nature" of Franklin's results, but they are the only ones in that issue to propose the double helix structure with the specific features that explained all of the evidence, published and unpublished.
We actually recently made the decision to staff someone full time on the site just to maintain it for the community. Even the JSON file for the site gets hit hundreds of thousands of times per day...feels like it's become kind of the de-facto source of truth in the community for where to get reliable AWS pricing information and I believe its powering a pretty remarkable amount of downstream applications with how much usage its getting.
We acquired the site almost 5 years ago and want to continue to improve it for the community. If you have any cloud cost management needs, we're also able to help for our main business here: https://www.vantage.sh/
Indeed, the vast majority of Americans have no exposure to equities, or limited exposure through a 401k or a pension. "Be a shame if something happened to these meager rows in a database we've been conning you is the path to financial independence and security. Won't you think of your crumbs?" But I digress. TLDR If the equities market implodes, it'll be mostly fine. The stock market is not the economy [1] [2]. The economy is demand for goods and services.
(and I say this as someone with more exposure to the capital markets than most Americans, while hedging against irrationality, voting vs weighing machine and all that)
> A similar fate befell Dr. Rosalind Franklin, the chemist excluded from the Nobel awarded to her colleagues James Watson, Francis Crick, and Maurice Wilkins for the discovery of DNA.
Franklin's name is a link to a paywalled Medium article. Found a copy expecting to see some nuanced discussion about the specific contributions she made, only to find that the missing bits were that they were mean to her about her lipstick and dress selection.
Maybe it's true, maybe it's not, but making the entire debate about her looks isn't doing anyone any favors.
Rosalind Franklin would never have gotten a Nobel Prize. She died from cancer in 1958, three years before the Watson, Crick and Wilkins were awarded their prize, and Nobel was very clear that his award could not be awarded posthumously. Only ~three people have gotten posthumous awards, and all of them were alive on February 1st of the year they got the award.
Wilkins (Franklin's boss) taking her data without her permission and sharing it with Watson and Crick so they could jump in at the end and analyze it faster than she did- and then not even put her name on the paper but Wilkins instead!- is truly classic academic evil. However, even if they had actually collaborated and Franklin's name had been on the paper, she would not have gotten a Nobel, due to the ovarian cancer that killed her at age 37.
The person really getting written out of history in this thread is Raymond Gosling, the PhD student, who actually took the famous "Photo 51"[0] that, along with other evidence, confirmed Watson and Crick's pre-existing hypothesis about the structure of DNA.
As Franklin was leaving the lab, Wilkins became Gosling's supervisor and the rest is history. Describing it as "her data" is not accurate -- the image belonged to King's College, not Franklin personally.
Whether or not Franklin received sufficient credit for her contributions I will leave to others to debate.
Her name is listed in the acknowledgements and she has a paper in the same issue as Watson&Crick. Also, there's evidence now that her data had already been shared in a departmental seminar when Wilkins shared it with Watson & Crick (I believe this is explained in detail in the Eighth Day of Creation, where the author did deep historical digging).
I don't think she would have concluded that the structure of DNA was a double helix with antiparallel strands (that's the important bit).
Yes, she had a paper, hastily thrown together because Watson and Crick were going to publish her data without her consent, and even to the men of 1952, what they had done to her was seen as pretty scuzzy, so they tried to give her an opportunity to at least claim a little credit. But this is a sign that even the the people around them saw that Franklin had been done wrong by Watson and Crick and Wilkins.
As far as "she shared it in a departmental seminar once, therefore her boss can just give it to others to beat her in the analysis phase without her consent" and "I don't think she would have gotten it right," neither of those are actually arguments. One of them is not how science is supposed to be done, the other is an un-provable assertion that a woman wasn't smart enough to figure something out, which makes me a little suspicious.
How exactly did you get to "a woman wasn't smart enough to figure something out, which makes me a little suspicious."? It sounds like you're saying I think she wasn't smart? I am merely reporting the facts as they have been reported, based on a number of different books/articles.
It was an intrinsically hard problem that Crick was especially prepared to solve. I doubt the vast majority of scientists, regardless of their sex, would have been able to solve the problem with the data they had.
Generally once you share data publicly, there is a blanket rule that people can use that data. Many people claim W&C stole the data (through Wilkins) but that does not seem to be true.
"In a full description of the structure in a paper submitted in August 1953 and published in 1954, Crick and Watson did attempt to set the record straight17. They acknowledged that, without Franklin’s data, “the formulation of our structure would have been most unlikely, if not impossible”, and implicitly referred to the MRC report as a “preliminary report” in which Franklin and Wilkins had “independently suggested that the basic structure of the paracrystalline [B] form is helical and contains two intertwined chains”."
> Franklin's name is a link to a paywalled Medium article.
I'm frustrated that in 2025, I am reading a dismissal of Franklin's contributions because someone has never heard of her and clicks on a link to Medium article to draw their conclusions. Wikipedia would be better. The 1950's was so long ago that there are (gasp) actual paper books on this history of the discovery of the double helix.
They followed the provided link, blame the person who posted the link not the person who says the link wasn't helpful.
If you try to back up your points with citations then those citations should help strengthen your case, you might still be right even if you cite bad articles but its still right to criticize bad citations.
I wish AWS all the best, but I will say that their developer-facing software doesn't have the best track record. Munger-esque "incentive defines the outcome" and all that, but I don't think they're well positioned to collect actionable insight from open GitHub repos.
Aside from the alleged "culture war" aspect, looking at the 2024 report you can see that the category "Asian" is at 36%. Roughly 5% of the US population can tick the "Asian" box on the census. There are a lot of people on both sides of the US political aisle asking why this is the case. Making it harder to tease that data out might limit blowback from low-effort attempts to smear the company.
It's clear at this point that there are massive abuses in the H-1B program, and remedying those abuses will absolutely mean limiting the H-1B. And that's before we even start to review the program vs. unemployment rates for native American STEM graduates.
That's largely a myth told by people with shiny new Coscast engine blocks to sell you.
They run too hot because everyone runs lawnmower-grade 95 octane petrol these days, which contributes more than anything else to liners breaking free especially with the liners being thinner on later (90s onwards) 94mm-piston engines. I do wonder if the switch from thin steel "shim" head gaskets to composite ones allowed the liners to move more?
Anyway they only break liners free completely (the infamous "dropped liner") if you run them absolutely bone dry of water until one piston expands enough to jam in the liner and start hammering it up and down, just before the engine seizes entirely.
It's cheap and easy to get the liners knocked out and the block machined to take "top hat" liners, with a lip around the top that clamps them in place, something like £1800 last time I looked.
> For health insurance, it should be a simple subsidy for those who can't pay out of pocket. Some industries must be regulated, even in a capitalist free-market country. Health care, prisons, law enforcement, defense contractors, banks to name a few. Regulated as in centrally price-controlled.
Maybe not now, but 10-ish years ago that was the French system. Very poor people get outpatient care that is free at the point of service. Everyone else gets highly regulated private insurance with a strong market component. Emergent/inpatient care is provided by hospitals that aren't part of the insurance system.
There are definitely some trade-offs there, but I wouldn't be opposed to such a system in the US.
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