The linked article has some top notch mental gymnastics. It goes through great pains to claim that Watson and Crick didn’t steal Franklins’s data (but were extremely cavalier about using it without telling her) and that they would’ve taken anyone’s data, not just a woman’s (although the data had to be brought to their attention because Watson didn’t take any notes on her lecture and instead only paid attention to her appearance).

I don’t know what drives people to make unfounded assertions defending the legacy of male scientists even while going through such lengths to describe the sexism female scientists faced. It’s like they want to imagine sexism was just something in the air that happened to affect women and not caused or perpetuated by anyone.

There’s something delightful about the meme not even getting her name right.

Thank fuck I was born in this era. I would totally be popping Qualudes in the 1950s dealing with this bs.

The 1st myth is that watson and crick figured out the solved the double helix by themselves. The 2nd myth is that they stole Rosalind Franklin’s work and screwed her over. Both are misconceptions propagated by pop culture and Watson’s own embellishments…

Franklin was a great crystallographer who contributed many key insights into the characteristics of the double helix. There were many brilliant scientists working on this problem at the time pushing technology to their limits to gain every piece of information we could about DNA’s structure.

Franklin was a big name in her own right, and to say that Watson and Crick could figure out the double helix by stealing picture 51, whereas Franklin could not, implies that she couldn’t figure out her own data, and is frankly insulting to her intellect.

This article explains it much better than I ever could: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-01313-5