Emilien’s testimony in The 12 Coups de midi highlights a growing movement to rehabilitate the memory of women victims of historical injustice, like Rosalind Franklin, whose contributions were overlooked and overshadowed by her male colleagues.
In the show The 12 Coups de midiWednesday December 18, the current midday master, Émilien, wanted to provide clarification to the production concerning the suggested answers to the question: “Which scientist is correctly associated with what made him famous?“. Before validating the “Watson / DNA” association, the game champion explained: “I believe it was Watson and Crick who were awarded the Nobel Prize for the discovery of DNA… There were two of them who stole a woman’s work. They were rewarded, even though this work was originally carried out by a woman named Rosalind Franklin. We rewarded them, even though it was she who made the discovery.”
Faced with the astonishment of Jean-Luc Reichmann, who wondered how the history student knew of this fact, Émilien was delighted that “we talk about it more and more“. “We now value these women, who have been silenced while men have taken the light in their place.“, he concluded.
Lack of recognition and theft
An emblematic scientific figure, Rosalind Franklin was the first to discover the helical structure of deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA). This British chemist and crystallographer made a major advance in the field thanks to her work on X-ray diffraction, and in particular the famous photograph 51, which revealed the famous double helix structure of DNA. His data was used without his consent by James Watson and Francis Crick, who later received honors.
As Émilien recalled in The 12 Coups de midiher role was minimized, and it was James Watson, Francis Crick and Maurice Wilkins who received the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1962, four years after the young woman’s death from ovarian cancer.
Beyond her work on DNA, Rosalind Franklin also contributed to the understanding of the molecular structures of anthrax and viruses, research that has influenced diverse fields from materials science to virology.
