THE MAIL

The discovery of DNA’s structure has been told and retold as a triumph of science, a neat tale of genius deduction capped with a double helix. The textbooks make it sound like truth was laid bare, clear as day, in a single crystallographic photograph. Yet what was brought to the public table was less a feast of evidence than a carefully plated fable. Single Source Problem All of the early conclusions about DNA’s structure were drawn from a single preparation of sodium DNA (NaDNA) in dry form. Rosalind Franklin’s diffraction studies were confined to this one source. She did not compare across multiple DNA samples from different organisms. The entire story of heredity — the claim that the same structure encoded all living things — was extrapolated from a narrow slice of evidence. The possibility remains that other DNA might not have looked the same at all. Helix by Assumption The iconic two-chain helix of B-DNA was not directly observed. It was suggested based on missing spots in ...

In 1953, Francis Crick and James Watson announced the structure of DNA — the double helix — in a short paper in Nature . Their discovery has been enshrined as one of the great triumphs of modern science: the key that unlocked genetics, inheritance, and the very code of life. Textbooks repeat the story like gospel: brilliant deduction, confirmed by crystal-clear evidence, delivering a eureka moment of certainty. But beneath this polished myth lies a far messier truth. Crick himself admitted that the idea of DNA’s twisting strands came not solely from data, but from a dream — sometimes described as his, sometimes his wife’s. At the same time, Rosalind Franklin’s meticulous X-ray diffraction work provided a key empirical clue, yet her contribution was marginalized, her photograph shared without consent, and her name sidelined from the Nobel glory. This is not simply academic bickering about credit. It reveals a deeper pattern: science, like politics and medicine, is subject to what Dave C...