Title:

Letter from Charlotte Friend to Francis Crick

Creator:

Friend, Charlotte

Recipient:

Crick, Francis, 1916-2004

Date:

11 September 1979

Description:

Friend here criticized a potentially misleading statement Crick had made in his retrospective, "How to Live with a Golden Helix" (The Sciences, vol. 19, Sept. 1979, pp. 6-9), about Rosalind Franklin's approach to science, namely that she was overly concerned with producing definitive experimental evidence before drawing conclusions. Even though Crick became a friend of Franklin's during the last five years of her life, he found it difficult to fully assess her role in the discovery of the DNA double helix. He and Watson had relied on her experimental evidence in their discovery, but had done so without her knowledge and without giving her full credit in their first published accounts of the DNA structure.

Original Repository:

The Wellcome Library for the History and Understanding of Medicine. Francis Harry Compton Crick Papers

Location:

Box: 23. Folder: PP/CRI/D/2/18

Rights:

Reproduced with permission of the Mount Sinai Medical Center. Archives.

Genre:

Letters (correspondence)

Subject:

Crystallography, X-Ray and DNA

Format:

Text

Extent:

1 pages

Relation:

How to Live with a Golden Helix, 1979
Letter from Francis Crick to the Editor of The Sciences, 1979
Letter from Charlotte Friend to the Editor of The Sciences, 1979
Letter from Francis Crick to Charlotte Friend, 1979
Letter from Aaron Klug to Francis Crick, 1979
Letter from Aaron Klug to Francis Crick, 1979
Letter from Margaret Markham to Francis Crick, 1979

Language:

English

Legacy Source Citation:

Original Repository. Wellcome Library for the History and Understanding of Medicine. Francis Harry Compton Crick Papers. 11646. URL. http://archives.wellcome.ac.uk/

Legacy ID:

SCBBQB

NLM ID:

101584582X227

Profiles Collection:

The Francis Crick Papers

Shareable Link:

https://profiles.nlm.nih.gov/101584582X227

Story Section:

The Discovery of the Double Helix, 1951-1953