James Watson, widely renowned for his discovery of the DNA double helix alongside Francis Crick, for which they won a Nobel Prize in Medicine, passed away on November 6, 2025, at 97 years old. A giant in the field of genetics and hereditary biology, his scientific career and legacy have, in recent years, come under massive scrutiny as Watson and Crick’s discovery rested on uncredited research. 

Instead, many, including Watson himself, would later concede the indispensability of physical chemist Rosalind Franklin’s data. Franklin had been analyzing the crystalline and paracrystalline forms of DNA, the distinct structural states exhibited by DNA when observed through X-ray diffraction. 

Watson, who made numerous consistently sexist and racist remarks across his career, published an autobiographical account of his and Crick’s findings in 1968. In it, he described his first encounter with Photograph 51, a photograph of DNA’s paracrystalline structure by Franklin. Unbeknownst to Franklin, her work had been co-opted by Watson. 

By Watson’s account, he ‘immediately recognized’ DNA’s double helix, whilst Franklin, who had been analyzing the image for months, had not. Here, Watson implies that he, a novice, had triumphed over a skilled chemist like Franklin, leading to his discovery. However, the infamous photograph could only have revealed that the form of DNA was helical in nature, a claim that was already accepted. 

In a 1969 letter to Science, Max Perutz, Crick’s supervisor, revealed it was shortly after Watson saw Photograph 51 that Perutz handed them an informal report of the activity of the King’s Medical Research Council (MRC) unit in London, which Franklin had joined in 1951. Franklin’s contributions to the paper were instrumental in forming Watson and Crick’s model of DNA.  

By not giving due credit to Franklin, Watson and Crick’s actions actively played into the systemic discrimination against women, who have historically been marginalized, through the erasure of their contributions and intellect. It would take years for anyone to question Watson’s account, and for the true significance of Franklin’s contributions to come to light. 

Franklin’s story forces us to confront the true nature of ‘merit’ in the face of field-wide marginalization, and brings into question how to reconcile the legacy of previously indubitable scientific ‘greats.’  

An imperial and colonial footprint

Franklin’s experience was far from unusual. Scientific discovery is shaped by patriarchy and colonialism as the story of Achmad Mochtar demonstrates. 

Born in 1891, Mochtar was a prolific Indigenous Indonesian doctor and researcher. After studying malaria with Wilhelm Schüffner, who discovered Schüffner’s dots — the characteristic red stippling present in infections of certain strains of malaria — Mochtar obtained Schüffner’s recommendation and pursued his doctorate at the University of Amsterdam. 

There, he disproved existing research and theories on yellow fever, and contributed significantly to advancements in leptospirosis study, specifically the zoonotic strain causing the disease in humans. His work in tropical diseases would contribute immeasurably to vaccine development and public health measures in the following decades.

Then, Mochtar joined Jakarta’s acclaimed Eijkman Institute in 1937, and published 25 research articles between 1929–1942, until the year he became the institute’s first Indigenous director. That same year, he became a senior executive of the Medical Academy. His career was prolific, yet it unfolded in a system of largely illusory meritocracy, leaving his recognition contingent on the approval of those in power.  

The fragile nature of Mochtar’s influence was made clear when he and most of his team were arrested in October 1944. There had been mass casualties of romusha — a Japanese word meaning ‘unskilled worker’ that was reclaimed by the Indonesians to mean ‘slave worker’ — who had received a typhus, cholera, and dysentery vaccine. 

Japan had occupied the archipelago for three years at the time, oppressing the native Indonesian population. They blamed Mochtar for these deaths, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary. An investigation by the University of Oxford in 2010 would reveal Mochtar’s arrest and subsequent proceedings to be a scheme to cover for failed medical experiments by the Japanese. 

The Imperial Japanese Army tortured Mochtar and his team for months, resulting in the death of one of his colleagues. In an effort to spare the rest of his team, Mochtar agreed to sign a confession stating he had placed purified tetanus toxin in the vaccines administered to the romusha victims. Achmad Mochtar was beheaded by Japanese forces on July 3, 1945, his body crushed by a steamroller, and his remains discarded, alongside eight of his colleagues, into a swamp well. 

His work and legacy would be forgotten for the next six decades. Many historians and researchers speculate that had Indonesian independence occurred 45 days earlier, rather than on August 17, 1945, Mochtar would’ve been the country’s first Nobel laureate, for his remarkable work in tropical diseases. 

Mochtar’s story exemplifies the very systemic marginalization that warps any attempt at an objective scientific meritocracy.

Modern legacies

Unlike Rosalind Franklin and Achmad Mochtar, systemic marginalization in science is not an issue lost to the annals of time. The power systems that existed then remain pertinent in how science’s current Western-centric view of our field alienates researchers of a non-Eurocentric background. 

Scientists attempting to integrate Indigenous knowledge, like traditional Chinese medicine, are continuously dismissed, ridiculed, and excluded from ‘legitimate’ scientific discourse. Racial and religious minority groups face pay discrimination, garner less professional respect, and endure micro and macroaggressions throughout their careers. 

The #BlackintheIvory movement on Twitter, where Black scholars took to social media to share their experiences in academia, revealed the disrespect marginalized populations experience. One molecular biologist tweeted about their experience being physically blocked from a faculty mailroom for ‘not looking like they work there.’  

Trans researchers also continue to be targeted by pseudoscientific movements. These movements not only go beyond dictating what topics they study are ostensibly academically permissible, but also seek to rob trans researchers of affirmative care and rights, including having their chosen name appear on publications. 

Even now, revisionist accounts misframe Franklin as undeserving of due credit — for example, by perpetuating the misconception that she had not yet disseminated Photograph 51 and only Watson appreciated its significance — rather than a scientific discoverer in her own right. However, this framing ignores the gendered epistemic structures under which she worked. 

Franklin did not apprehend the structure of DNA before Watson and Crick, partly because she was working on her own, excluded from the world of informal exchanges in which Watson and Crick were immersed. Also, Watson and Crick routinely cited Wilkins as the more senior member of the MRC before Franklin, with Wilkins repeating much of Franklin’s work. In fact, Franklin contributed several key insights to the discovery of the double helix, such as how DNA could specify proteins.   

Science promises an objective meritocracy, but Franklin and Mochtar’s stories remind us that too often recognition is dictated by privilege, bias, and historical circumstance. As Omar El-Akkad, a post-colonial journalist and activist, writes in his book, One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This: “one day, everyone will have always been against this.” But that imagined future does not absolve us of our current ignorance. The only path to reconciling the legacies founded on our history of marginalization is to ensure we do better than the past we condemn.