Box 2. The Helix Funeral Invitation

Maurice Wilkins insisted that DNA was helical before there was clear evidence. That greatly annoyed Rosalind Franklin, as did so many things about him. Franklin was well aware that the x-ray diffraction photographs of the A form, unlike those of the B form, lacked the clear X-shaped pattern indicative of a helix. Instead, they displayed a detailed and confusing assortment of reflections that she could only interpret through the complicated and daunting procedure of cylindrical Patterson analysis. Therefore, when, over a period of about five months starting on 18 April 1952, Franklin recorded some misleading, apparently asymmetrical double orientation data in the A form, she got perverse pleasure out of possibly annoying Wilkins with her result. As a joke, she penned the "death of the helix" funeral invitation reproduced here. That she wrote the invitation is clearly substantiated in interviews with Raymond Gosling and Wilkins and in many other professional accounts.

The extent and significance of the distribution of the invitation is another matter. During interviews, only diffraction expert Alec Stokes said that he had received one. A few people said that they saw an invitation posted on a bulletin board, and most said that they had never even seen one. That testimony is incompatible with the often repeated claim that a multitude of these cards were sent out.

Historians Horace Judson and Robert Olby argued that the invitation indicated Franklin was antihelical, although Olby notes it was a joke as well.^10,11 To the contrary: Franklin's student Raymond Gosling is adamant that Franklin considered the B form, with its striking x-ray pattern, to be helical. Examinations of Franklin's notebooks have led to the same conclusion, although it is also clear that, for a while, Franklin definitely had her doubts about the helicity of the A form.

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© 2003 American Institute of Physics