That Black people were genetically less intelligent. That embryos should be screened to eliminate “stupid children.”⁵
Cold Spring Harbor severed ties in 2019.
His obituaries this week called him brilliant and flawed. “Complex.” “Controversial.” One even called him a “truth‑teller.”
None said thief.
None said Franklin first.
You don’t have to break the rules when you’re the one writing them.
In 2023, Cobb and Nathaniel Comfort published new findings from Franklin’s archives⁶. What they showed was simple: Franklin wasn’t merely exploited.
She was first.
She’d built the technical scaffolding that supported the double helix. She had the photograph. She had the equations. She was closer to the answer than history wanted to admit. The tragedy, Cobb argued, wasn’t just in what was taken—but in how long it took to give it back.
Schoolchildren now learn her name. King’s College named a building after her. Oxford built a research center⁷. Popular science magazines write her back into the narrative, and women in labs across the world wear her name on pins and plaques.
Still, something lingers.
She wasn’t a martyr. She didn’t need to be rescued. She needed to be cited. Included. Believed.
And she needed the man who saw her photograph to say, clearly, from the start:
It wasn’t his to take.
Science may be empirical:
Credit is cultural.
And culture still decides who gets to be heard.
The next time you hear “Watson and Crick,” say her name first.
James Watson died last week.
Rosalind Franklin is still waiting to be first.
And she’s no longer waiting alone.
History, too, takes photographs. We’re still learning how to develop them.