Article Questions

1.Sir Lawrence Bragg, Director of the laboratory in which they were employed, did not want Watson and Crick "fishing in other people's ponds" by working on the structure of DNA. To what extent is science territorial, and to what extent is such territoriality: beneficial or harmful; necessary or unnecessary; ethical or unethical? (Consider Fat Man and Little Boy.)
It is good for scientists to work together to reach a conclusion, but a scientist should not take credit for research that was done by someone else. Being territorial can be beneficial because the work you have done is guarded against being stolen, but harmful because you cannot collaborate ideas with other scientists.

2. Watson and Crick clearly made use of the ideas and results of other scientists in pursuing their goal, including those of Linus Pauling, Erwin Chargaff and Rosalind Franklin. This is, of course, a commonly accepted practice. What was it, then, that led Ann Sayre to suggest that Franklin had been treated unethically as a result of the use of her findings in the construction of the Watson-Crick DNA model? Is Sayre correct in her assessment?
The fact that they were given so much recognition for their discovery while giving her very little credit is unethical. Most of what Watson and Crick discovered about the structure of DNA was based on guesses according to known information about DNA. Franklin, on the other hand, performed many long experiments to obtain her research. Sayre is correct in her statements that Rosalind Franklin did not receive the credit that she deserved.

3. To what extent do the social values that Franklin had to confront (chauvinistic and derogatory attitudes toward women) justify her reticence to engage in discussions about her research progress with her male colleagues?
Women are definitely considered a minority in many science fields. She did not expect her male colleagues to support her in her persistent and strenuous research. Many men believe that they are better than women at their jobs and do not like it when women achieve higher things than they have.

4. Credit for a scientific discovery is generally accorded to the person(s) who first publishes the finding in an accredited scientific journal. Do you see any ethical problems with this accepted practice? Can you think of any objective criteria for deciding how significant a scientist's contribution to a discovery or a result should have to be in order to merit receiving credit for it and/or being listed as one of the authors of the research paper that describes it?
This practice is not very fair because the person who first publishes a discovery is not always the first person to discover it. When a discovery is published, proper credit should be given to all the researchers who helped with research or experimentation for the discoveries that the major principles of an article or journal are based on.

5. Competition can frequently stimulate rapid progress in scientific research. On the other hand, competition can also impede the sharing of ideas and interim results, which are generally of great value for the healthy development of science. Can you think of any guidelines that might result in an appropriate balance between these opposing values?
Competition in scientific research can be beneficial and motivating if it is done in a genial fashion. If completely separate experiments and research are done pertaining to the same topic, scientists can compare conclusions and agree what in their results is true and what is false. A third party scientist or expert may be useful to help determine what is correct in opposing results.

Search for the Structure of DNA:

One of the most significant scientific advances of the 20th century was the discovery of DNA structure. One of the first people to research this topic was Rosalind Franklin. She went to Kings College in London in 1951 to set up and be in charge of an X-ray diffraction laboratory. There she began to research the structure of DNA through the X-ray diffraction of DNA fibers. The only thing missing from her research was precisely how the nucleotide bases fit into the structure. A few years later, James Watson and Francis Crick collaborated together at Cambridge laboratory to determine the structure of DNA. They based their research off of Rosalind Franklin’s discoveries which they obtained, without her consent, from a research paper that she wrote. They did not actually perform any experiments. Instead, they built a model based on her research combined with their guessing. This model was consistent with the known facts and could account for the biological role of DNA. They published this model in a paper they wrote in 1953. They received worldwide recognition as the discoverers of the DNA structure, and won the Nobel Prize. Rosalind Franklin did not receive any credit for the information that they obtained from her research. Today most high school and college science text books do not reference her contributions to the discovery of the structure of DNA.