Mapping Nature’s scientist: The posthumous demarcation of Rosalind Franklin’s crystallographic data

Abstract

ABSTRACT Nature, the journal that in 1953 published James Watson and Francis Crick’s double-helix model of DNA, also published numerous pieces about crystallographer Rosalind Franklin. Franklin’s coverage, however, was published largely after her death in 1958 and dealt with the fact that, without her knowledge, Franklin’s colleague Maurice Wilkins gave Watson her crystallographic images of DNA and thereby supplied him with the key data upon which his model was built. In this analysis of the 68 Nature pieces on Franklin and DNA published in the years following her death, we argue that the amalgamation of this coverage performed sophisticated and sustained boundary-work that outlined the realm of science and the scientist as just outside the bounds of Franklin’s life and career. Three mechanisms of intra-scientific demarcation are revealed as operating across these publications, including: (1) the defiance of generic expectation, (2) performances of scientific epideictic, and (3) argument from dissociation. We explicate how these mechanisms supported a mapping of science writ large that employed Franklin in the role of what Thomas Gieryn labels a “contrast-case.” This analysis offers a theoretical infrastructure for studying how technical communities create and sustain their borders via cartographic legacies of socializing rhetorics.