Still Treated as an Joke – Happy Birthday Rosalind Franklin 🎉

Q “What did Crick and Watson discover?”

A: “Rosalind Franklin’s notes!”

Haha! Ha! HA!!

Ha…

I hate this joke. I absolutely despise it with a passion.

This has to be one of my most controversial and fart-in-a-spacesuit opinions: modern science communication, particularly with a feminist slant, is treating Rosalind Franklin way worse than she ever was back when she was alive.

There are a lot of other adjacent problems I have, of course. Science communication about women seems to be stuck in an “there’s only two chicks in the entire galaxy” loop: specifically Franklin and Skłodowska-Curie. Though that’s gotten better in recent years. We are just about allowed to talk about women who are still alive, for instance.

To understand my problem with science communication on Franklin, we need to look at this:

That’s ‘Molecular Configuration in Sodium Thymonucleate’, Nature volume 171, pages 740–741 (1953). The authors being Rosalind E. Franklin and Raymond G. Gosling. And if the date and journal seem familiar, that’s because it was published at the same time that Crick and Watson published their own famous paper – the third in the series was the one by Wilkins. If you turn the page after finishing Crick and Watson, you find Franklin and Gosling.

It’s behind a paywall, because reasons, and you absolutely should not buy it. But it’s also difficult (not impossible) to track down full, decently scanned copies, especially since using Sci Hub to download a scientist’s papers started being treated as a worse criminal offence than murdering them.

Few people seem to understand that this paper even exists, never mind what its content is. I can probably count on one hand the times I’ve seen someone communicate the science behind the structure of DNA and mention it or explore it.

On one level, it’s easy to explain why this is. This paper is dull, boring, technical, and tedious to go through. The X-ray diffraction world has come on so far since that it’s almost quaint to read. It’s of interest to specialists, as most papers are, and there’s a very limited amount of interesting things you can extract to make good pop-science fodder.

If you wanted to unpack it, you need to know a few things first… and I think many of those things fly in the face of the usual Sunday School version of the DNA story.

• You need to know these people were not “discovering” DNA — it had been known as a molecule for a very long time,
• You need to know that there are multiple forms of DNA, based on its level of hydration — so they weren’t “discovering the structure” of DNA as much as refining what was known about the specific forms of it,
• You also need to know that they weren’t even establishing that it was helical — again, something that had been known, or at least very strongly suspected, for a while (you can read that in Franklin and Gosling, above).
• Hell, you might need to know that Rosalind Franklin isn’t even the first female crystallographer overlooked in the DNA story — that unfortunate honour probably belongs to Florence Bell, working in the Astbury lab!
• You might also, wait for it, need to know that Frankling didn’t acquire the famous Photo 51 — that was Gosling, which raises awkward questions about supervisors stealing credit for their students’ work.

That was all done throughout the preceding 20-something years before Crick, Watson, Franklin, Wilkins and Gosling published their famous papers.

What Franklin and Gosling’s paper adds is the specific qualities of the helix in DNA: how quickly it turns, and the distances between atoms and groups. This is essential fine detail for building a structural model of it. We can hazard a guess at what it looks like if we suspect it’s helical, but unless this number matches up with the molecular model proposed by Crick and Watson in the preceding paper, we have a problem. We’re after all the fine detail at this stage.

And Franklin and Gosling did this with some exceedingly tedious, complex and dull mathematics that match up X-ray diffraction patterns to the molecular structure. And make absolutely no mistake: that’s hard work, it’s a big challenge. It requires skill, learning, practice, experience, and time plus dedication. This is highly specialist, complicated stuff.

And there’s the problem.

A lot of the popular perceptions of science are built on this idea of lone geniuses who simply see the Matrix and figure things out with instinct. If we’re lucky, we might see them working hard instead. But, on some level, it will always come back to individual personalities working alone and making grandiose discoveries in that instant. It’s far easier to get “Franklin discovered DNA single-handedly and two men stole all her work” into your head than to understand the decades of work, near-misses, and steady accumulation of evidence by hundreds of people that lead to the double helix. It ended with the Nobel Prize going to Maurice Wilkins, Francis Crick, and the abusive step-dad of DNA James Watson. They accidentally became the capstone on this massive scientific undertaking, it was never just them, and it never will be just one or two people working on problems of this size.

That’s what science is. It’s endless tedious accumulation of data to synthesise a conclusion that might be years in the making.

You might see the big speeches and announcements, and in the modern day the TikTok dances in the lab. But you don’t see the work. You don’t see the reading, the trial and error, the endless filling in of logs and lab books, ethical and COSHH applications (though that’s probably less applicable to the 1950s…) and more reading, and more questions, and more torn up notebooks of failure. That’s the part that isn’t talked about because it isn’t fun and it isn’t sexy. It’s tedious, and awful, and makes the job a job, not a “calling” or whatever people have described it as.

And if you dive into the work and contributions from Franklin, that’s what you find. Someone who has turned up, that has done the work, puts in the graft, and sticks her head down to prepare samples, acquire and process data, does the reading does the supervision, and writes it up at the end in excruciating technical detail.

In short, you find a competent, even masterful, scientist.

And she’s still reduced to a punchline of a joke.

A Call to Inaction: Universities Should not Join The Fediverse

As Twitter steadily turns further to shit, the hunt to replace everyone’s least-favourite verbal-abuse-based theme park ride continues. The popularity of long-standing free/open-source alternative Mastodon, and the accompanying Fediverse, continues to chug along. I won’t bore the uninitiated with the jargon except for the one thing needed to understand this post: you can start your own server (paying for hosting) and then connect it with the rest of the system to talk to everyone on it. So, unlike a VB or phpBB forum of old that you might stash on your own server and host a few dozen or hundred accounts, you can follow and be followed by anyone and connect to various other networks, not all of which are Twitter-like.

This has lead to numerous calls for universities to join it. I’ll use the one I’ve linked to as a jumping off point, as it also makes the case for students to use it, and even have it given to them by default as their key account. The purported benefits are community, decentralisation, and conversation without putting your trust in a corporate entity like Twitter or Facebook.

But here is why this is a bad thing and we should not do it.

Bad for Academic Freedom

Many academic staff use / have used Twitter for a combination of personal and professional work. It’s difficult, if not impossible, to separate these two spheres. I’ve seen people make a herculean effort to separate the two by running multiple accounts. Inevitably, even that still blurs the line as you will follow and be followed by the same single-account people anyway using both your ‘personal’ and ‘professional’ personas.

Despite this blur, we can get away with not representing our respective institutions because it’s Twitter – it’s not formally linked to our employers. Finding out who we work for is usually trivial but, still, it’s activity that’s nestled away over there, and badged as personal regardless. It’s ambiguous, but it works. Mostly.

All this changes the instant you end up with a “.ac.uk” or “.edu”at the end of your handle.

In that situation, there is no ambiguity. You are there representing your employer, and on their terms, using their money and resources to post and host content – not only your content, but the content of anyone you follow, since Mastodon servers cache everyone you follower, and image-heavy users fill up that disk space with NSFW furry art faster than Netflix will cancel a fantasy series.

The joy of unambiguously representing your employer

Unambiguously representing your employer brings with it many limitations. Small talk about movies and music would be allowed. I’m sure. Right? Maybe. But what about the spicier subjects that Academic Twitter has made itself known for?

CanI criticise league tables just as we’re rising up through them on an edict from the Vice Chancellor?

Can I criticise the institutions polices and implementations?

Can I shitpost? And swear?

Can I post pro-Union content and endorse strike action?

If you have to earnestly whistleblow anything from corruption to bullying and sexual assault allegations, you do not want your employer having access to the “suspend account” button.

On separate servers not controlled by the institution, that’s at least a muddy grey area, one ruled mostly by precedent, unreliable common sense and assurances that we’re posting only in a personal capacity. In an area owned and operated, wholly and officially, by the institution, if you can’t say it on your website profile, best not to say it at all. Naturally, this would mean switching to personal accounts to keep things separate. But, again, that separation is difficult to maintain by all except the most stoically self-involved of academics. That also undermines the idea of having an account designed to interact with the whole of the fediverse.

The overlap of the personal and professional

Now, what about situations where that personal capacity overlaps with professional capacity?

My professional remit covers student mental health: and one key contributors to that is finance, driven by a need to pay extortionate rent. There is no boundary between this professional remit and my personal conclusion that student landlords are a scam designed to transfer billions in public funds (as maintenance loans) into private hands (as rent). It is a simple smooth transition from observation to conclusion. This sort of thing cannot be said without bringing my employer, if not the entire sector, into some disrepute as it’s a sector that has steadily done nothing to address this, an even actively contributed to it through their expensive, decade-long arms race to build the shiniest buildings. It is incredibly murky for me to make this observation even in a personal capacity linked to my job, never mind on server owned and branded by the University. Yet, I’d be professionally negligent to not raise it as a key factor in student wellbeing.

Sure, you can choose to only post papers, dryly network with others and, frankly, just be a boring old fuck.

But for the majority who actually use social media in a semi-professional capacity (which is actually a minority of all university workers) that is not the case. Remaining boring necessarily means lower engagement and fewer people being in interested in what you have to say. No one, in practice, cares for people who have used their social media accounts for nothing except professional self-promotion. At the same time, those refusing to take any stand at all against injustices are simply branded complicit in it.

That overlap can only exist when we have the capacity to post individually. Otherwise, it’s just Worktribe with bells on.

Bad (or at least pointless) for Students

I’m now into my second decade teaching professionally in higher education. My current job title sounds very senior and fancy. I’d like to think I have sufficient experience to judge what would happen if we automatically gave every student a fediverse account. I’ll sum it up in one word: nothing.

Students will not use it. It’s yet another system, another location, another thing to check. So another thing to ignore.

There are now 15 competing standards

We have our Student Information System (SIS), the Virtual Learning Environment (VLE), SharePoint, Teams, PebblePad, the Canvas forums, email… and that’s just the official university systems that I can remember off the top of my head. There will be more. Parallel to that we have various backchannels: Instagram accounts, Whatsapp groups, student society groups on Facebook, institutional social media accounts… it’s a crowded field, competing for your attention. Each addition dilutes the one thing we need: authoritative, single points of truth, which are communicated easily.

[to anyone who has just exclaimed ‘but that’s what the fediverse can be!’ please do join me in reality]

It’s hard enough having to keep with with multiple Canvas sites running in tandem without also adding Mastodon tags or accounts to push information to students. The path of least resistance would be to simply ignore it, and never engage. It’ll come via email anyway. I’m not saying that’s the most likely course, I’m saying that will be the course. Setting up student communities artificially and with institutional authority over it will always be met with a passive shrug.

You can always force engagement by staking marks and credits on it, of course, but…

Intolerance of the intolerant

But suppose I’m wrong.

I’m not, but let’s suppose.

Suppose there is engagement from students, whether naturally or forced because grades are decided by it. We then have to look at moderation, and that’s a bit more complex than “just moderate it”. This requires time, effort, resource. I’ve ran a few MOOCs in recent years, and despite these running for a few months, with only a few hundred users interacting on my course, it was an enormous drain on my brain space and capacity. Asking me to moderate mine and my students’ Fediverse presence is not a trivial ask because it’s quite a serious duty. And it’s one I do not want. My job is slammed full as it is.

Let’s be clear: the Fediverse swings very left/liberal. Moderation of a server must clamp down on things such as racism and transphobia. Personally speaking: this is good. I genuinely like that aspect. If a server decides it wants to host racists and massive homophobes, the others very quickly isolate it and stop talking to it. But that works because people individually own their communities, are responsible for them, and have every right to control what they allow to be hosted on there. They’re paying the server costs, after all. You want to host bullshit, pay up and take the consequences.

Once you have a University signing up, that forces them to adopt a compatible stance, and by extension control and moderate their students’ personal political stances. If I, in a personal capacity, click ‘block’ on a twerp who turns out to be a student within my university, faculty, school or even on my degree programme, well that’s one thing. If I have to do it, to delete and censor their posts on their official, institutionally-backed account, which provides them access to course materials and information, and gives them an official presence within the Fediverse, or else I risk my entire institutional presence on that system, well, that’s something else entirely. You’re basically excluding students before you even start, removing them from an official platform purely for their political stance.

And that brings us back to the same point again: why would anyone want to use an account with such restrictions when they can get their own, and post without restriction?

To be clear: those are political stances that are wrong, and I do believe it is immoral. Many of those stances, if acted on, go against our internal codes of conduct and policies (as they would for many employers). But those police behaviour in the context of official activities, not online communities where personal and professional beliefs mix. I can and will protect, for instance, my trans students from abuse. I am institutionally supported in doing so. I can’t (and won’t) kick someone out of my lectures just because they joined the Harry Potter Society and started liking their author’s paranoid tweets. If I’m allowed to have opinions on the grounds of “personal capacity”, I’ll extend that courtesy to students. At least as far as Prevent lets me.

If we wanted the university to federate, someone would need to police those opinions much more closely. And despite what the newspapers think happens, none of us have the time for that.

What is it good for?

To be clear: I’m not saying the following are bad ideas:

• Academic staff signing up via Mastodon,
• Students signing up via Mastodon,
• Universities and departments signing up via Mastodon,
• Universities starting their own server so that they can have @department@institution.edu accounts.

That’s fine, but it’s also not even a mild departure from what has always been possible, no matter the platform.

But officiating our presence? Compelling a sign-up by default? (a shadow-profile thing that Meta’s Threads has been getting shit for recently) Even hinting at making it essential for grades and communication?

I cannot think of much that’s worse.