Our first podcast collab about a woman in STEM
EPISODE LINK: Rosalind Franklin and the DNA discovery that was stolen from her
So Bitchstory just did our first collab! Ash from @fthat_pod joined us to enlighten us about yet another woman who was robbed by the patriarchy. Rosalind Franklin made one of the most important scientific discoveries of the 20th century and yet, if you google it, it is still credited to the dicks who stole her discovery!
Rosalind Franklin was a British chemist and X-ray crystallographer whose work was crucial in understanding the molecular structures of DNA, RNA, viruses, coal, and graphite. In the 1950s, It she captured the famous “Photograph 51,” an X-ray image that provided key evidence of the helical structure of DNA.
Her data was shared—without her direct permission—with James Watson and Francis Crick, who used it to build their model of DNA in 1953 (which they initially got wrong!) While Watson, Crick, and Maurice Wilkins received the Nobel Prize in 1962, Franklin had died of ovarian cancer in 1958 at the age of 37 and was not honored at the time.
Although her work was essential to the discovery of the DNA double helix, Franklin’s contributions were not only not recognized during her lifetime, but to this day many texts and even Google still credit the men who stole her work.
It was so fun to have another badass woman on the mic with us. Ash is impressively intelligent in a number of subjects, particularly biology and chemistry. She has a great voice and does a lot of work with crime victims to help them. You can find her podcast and Instagram here:
https://www.fthatpod.com/
https://www.instagram.com/fthat_pod