02-11-2022, 03:21 PM
(This post was last modified: 02-11-2022, 03:24 PM by RiverNotch.)
re Rosalind Franklin, afaik it's more complicated than that.
Watson was an asshole, Franklin's work was an unacknowledged -- in Watson's specific case, probably willfully unacknowledged -- influence on the work of Watson, Crick, and Wilkins, and Franklin did experience (and participate in) a lot of the institutional sexism of her day. Apparently posthumous Nobel prizes were a thing, if rare, before 1974, when they were formally restricted: just a year before, in 1961, Dag Hammarskjold won a Nobel shortly after his death by plane crash. But the only other time a posthumous Nobel was awarded was also in the same year after death, and at four years after her death, not only would she have been unable to plead her case (not that, by most accounts, she would have cared to plead it), but no one would have thought it reasonable to do so.
All that said, one of the people who won the Nobel later on -- Aaron Klug -- worked with Franklin specifically, and was the chief beneficiary of her will: it's known she would have shared his award in 1982, were she still alive by then. Really, if she were a victim, which she probably would have loathed to be thought of as such, then she was a victim of tragic irony, as it was most likely her work with radioactive substances that sparked her fatal case of ovarian cancer.
Watson was an asshole, Franklin's work was an unacknowledged -- in Watson's specific case, probably willfully unacknowledged -- influence on the work of Watson, Crick, and Wilkins, and Franklin did experience (and participate in) a lot of the institutional sexism of her day. Apparently posthumous Nobel prizes were a thing, if rare, before 1974, when they were formally restricted: just a year before, in 1961, Dag Hammarskjold won a Nobel shortly after his death by plane crash. But the only other time a posthumous Nobel was awarded was also in the same year after death, and at four years after her death, not only would she have been unable to plead her case (not that, by most accounts, she would have cared to plead it), but no one would have thought it reasonable to do so.
All that said, one of the people who won the Nobel later on -- Aaron Klug -- worked with Franklin specifically, and was the chief beneficiary of her will: it's known she would have shared his award in 1982, were she still alive by then. Really, if she were a victim, which she probably would have loathed to be thought of as such, then she was a victim of tragic irony, as it was most likely her work with radioactive substances that sparked her fatal case of ovarian cancer.