Matthew Cobb

Well, given that Franklin was dead, yes, I think it was.

I mean, ideally, Franklin would have lived much, much longer.

But she died in 1958 of ovarian cancer.

And the Nobel Prizes technically can't be awarded to people who are dead, and so she wasn't on the list.

And also, they can only be awarded to three people.

Now, had she lived, my solution...

whether the Nobel Prize Committee would have done this is another matter because we know their record with women scientists.

They could have given two people the physiology or medicine and two people the chemistry.

So they could have...

Noted all four.

And very strikingly, Crick was asked to, by Jacques Monod, who was nominating him, Crick was asked to write his own nomination, basically.

Jacques Monod wrote to him and said, what exactly did you do?

Can you tell me?

And so Crick writes this little note.

And he starts off by saying, you've got to remember that the key work upon which we relied, because...

you know, they needed to be able to confirm their hypothesis with data.

And that came from Rosalind Franklin, also from Morris Wilkins, but primarily it's from Franklin.

And so he says that in his first, uh, opening paragraph in this little letter to, uh, to Jacques Monod saying how it all happened.

Yeah, well, that, I mean, so this is something that wasn't known by, so there are two other biographies of Crick, both of which I think are pretty good.

There's Robert Olby's very academic one, which would tell you an awful lot about X-ray crystallography.