罗莎琳德·富兰克林小心翼翼地摆放好新“相机”，它距一个悬浮的DNA纤维只有15毫米远。这里的DNA已经用化学方式与蛋白质剥离开来。实验装置将X射线射向体积极小的DNA纤维，放射波在分子内的原子上发生衍射，勾勒出模糊的轮廓，然后在X射线身后的相机底片上形成图案。这种技术叫做结晶学，类似于用手和手电筒在墙上制造动物影子，不过这里的影子图像需要花费100小时才能形成。

富兰克林当时还不满32岁，在伦敦国王学院（King’s College）担任化学研究员的她要赶去参加英国皇家学会（Royal Society）会议，因而没有时间等待整个图像形成。（她外出后，由年轻的博士生雷蒙德·高斯林负责操作机器。）1952年5月2日，她回到实验室查看DNA结晶图——那是她拍摄的第51张照片，映入眼帘的是一幅极其美丽的图片。布伦达·马多克斯在她精彩的传记《罗莎琳德·富兰克林：DNA背后的黑暗女神》（Rosalind Franklin: The Dark Lady of DNA）中写道，它“显示了一个清晰的X，由从中心向外辐射，如同老虎皮毛般的黑色条纹形成。‘X’两条交叉线之间的空隙完全空白，让第51张照片成为有史以来最清晰的B形式DNA图片，由此可以完全确定DNA是螺旋形结构”。

这张照片成功捕捉了DNA的螺旋结构，促使詹姆斯·沃森和弗朗西斯·克里克重新审视他们的想法。不到两年后，两人宣布了他们关于生命分子结构的发现。

他们看到结晶图的方式至今仍存在争议，因为富兰克林的研究员同事莫里斯·威尔金斯在她不知情也未同意的情况下向沃森展示了这幅图像。安娜·齐格勒在她的戏剧《51号照片》（Photograph 51）中讲述了这个事件。富兰克林1958年死于卵巢癌，年仅37岁，至死未得到应有的回报。

四年后，沃森、克里克、威尔金斯共同获得诺贝尔奖。

诺贝尔奖只授予在世的人（基于这一事实，我们无法指责诺贝尔委员会轻视富兰克林的成就），但许多人认为，科学史掩盖了她在这个重大发现中的核心作用。

奥地利物理学家莉泽·迈特纳的生活和工作经历与富兰克林十分相近。（我去年读过露丝·丽温·赛姆于1996年出版的迈特纳传记，这是一本经典作品，非常值得一读。）迈特纳1938年就阐明了核裂变过程，并得到其他物理学家的认可。然而，1944年“因发现重原子核裂变”获得诺贝尔化学奖的奥托·哈恩几乎完全不承认她的贡献，一些教科书也是如此。

非科学界的人对此也许会感到震惊，可事实上科学向来都是由男性掌控的世界。近期，社会鼓励女性接受STEM（科学、技术、工程、数学）教育、从事STEM相关工作，在一定程度上改变了这种情形，不过科学界的文化经常使女科学家处于无比艰难的境地，比如把她们排除在讲究圈子的出版和同行评议之外，乃至对她们的成就冷嘲热讽。

如果想在科学、技术、数学和工程的性别平等方面取得进展，需要以真诚的努力打破阻碍我们前进的文化隔阂，因为它们不会在高中毕业后自动消失。（财富中文网）

译者：严匡正

Rosalind Franklin’s newfangled “camera” was poised delicately, fifteen millimeters away from the lone, suspended DNA fiber, now chemically stripped of its protein cloak. The experimental device shot a beam of X-rays at its infinitesimal target, which in turn yielded a pattern on some photographic film resting behind it as the radioactive waves diffracted off of the molecule’s atoms and etched a smudgy outline of its shape. The technique, called crystallography, was a bit like making a shadow animal on the wall with one’s hand and a flashlight. Except this shadow image took as long as one hundred hours to create.

Franklin, then just shy of her 32nd birthday and working as a research chemist at King’s College in London, had to rush off to a meeting at the Royal Society and so didn’t wait around for the full image to come into focus. (Raymond Gosling, a young Ph.D. student was there to run the machine in her absence.) But on May 2, 1952, when she returned to her lab to see the crystallographic picture of DNA—the 51st photograph she had taken—the image was beautiful. It “showed a stark x, formed of tigerish black stripes radiating out from the center,” writes Brenda Maddox in her wonderful biography, Rosalind Franklin: The Dark Lady of DNA. “The spaces between the arms of the x were completely blank. It was the clearest picture ever taken of the B form of DNA, unquestionably a helix.”

It was that picture—capturing the helical structure of DNA—that refocused the thinking of James Watson and Francis Crick, who would announce their own discovery of the structure of life’s molecular building block less than two years later.

The way they got to view that crystallographic image—Franklin’s research colleague, Maurice Wilkins, showed it to Watson without Franklin’s knowledge or approval—remains a matter of some controversy, which Anna Ziegler captures in her play, Photograph 51. As for Franklin, who died of ovarian cancer in 1958 at the age of 37, she never quite got her due.

Four years later the Nobel Prize went to Watson, Crick, and Wilkins.

While the Prize itself is awarded only to living people (a fact that spares any blame to the Nobel committee for slighting Franklin), the history of science, say many, has glossed over her central role in the discovery.

One can find a similar pattern in the life and work of Austrian-born physicist Lise Meitner. (Ruth Lewin Sime’s 1996 biography on Meitner, which I read last year, is a classic and very much worth reading.) Meitner’s work in elucidating the process of nuclear fission in 1938 is well accepted by her fellow physicists—but Otto Hahn, who won the 1944 Nobel Prize in Chemistry “for his discovery of the fission of heavy nuclei,” barely acknowledged her contribution. The same, unfortunately, goes for some textbooks.

It may come as a surprise to non-scientists, but science itself is about as “old boy network” as it comes. As much as recent efforts to encourage women in STEM education and STEM jobs have helped move the needle a bit, the culture of science has often made life for women scientists harder than it already is—excluding them from clubby publishing and peer review networks and sometimes outright snubbing their achievements.

If we’re going to make progress in gender equity in science, technology, math, and engineering, we need to dive in—frankly and honestly—to the cultural barriers that stand in the way. Those barriers don’t disappear after high school.