Box 1. The Evolution of Franklin's Intuition

Every scientist I interviewed, except James Watson and Max Perutz, agreed that Rosalind Franklin was a superb scientist with the sharp mind and vision needed to plan, execute, and analyze a good experiment. Questions about her capabilities have centered on her ability to make intuitive leaps when interpreting results, mainly because she seemed hesitant to do so in her DNA work. Franklin often expressed the opinion that the facts should speak for themselves. Her desire to have solid proof for her ideas before publishing them helps explain her highly successful publication record. She argued that a scientist need not be highly speculative, which gave the impression that she was incapable of speculation.

Franklin's manner and scientific approach while at King's College, London were uncannily close to those described by Frederick Dainton, Franklin's physical chemistry don when she was an undergraduate at Cambridge University. Writing to biographer Anne Sayre, Dainton says that "he was attracted by [Franklin's] directness . . . including the way she defended her point of view, something she was never loath to do." Dainton found Franklin to be a "very private person with very high personal and scientific standards, and uncompromisingly honest. . . . She once told me the facts will speak for themselves, but never fully accepted my urging that she must try to help the receptor of her messages. . . . As you point out, the logical sequential arguments meant everything to Rosalind. . . ."¹³

Francis Crick has suggested that Franklin's aversion to speculative thinking about DNA excludes her from the rank of the great scientists. He has noted, though, that the problem might not have been that Franklin lacked intuition, but rather that she might not have trusted it. Moreover, Crick has suggested that Franklin's intuition seemed to be rapidly improving as she matured as a scientist while working with tobacco mosaic virus. And if Franklin did not trust her intuition while working on DNA, it may have been at least partially because she did not have anyone at King's with whom she could properly discuss her ideas.

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© 2003 American Institute of Physics