Dejan, Alyssa Colleen M.

January 31, 2017

BIO 126

Didacticism

The documentary of Photo 51 left me wordless and so, upon writing this, I have added a new word
to my vocabulary which perfectly describes the film: didactic. Didactic media strongly pushes a lesson unto
a viewer, by telling them to believe this and believe that. I blame the NOVA staff. Most didactic books
wouldnt bother having an explanation for this lesson, because the real aim is to have the audience feel as
the author wants you to feel.

The first few minutes of the documentary start off okay, at least until the description of James
Watson. A few minutes more into the video, the message is clear: this man does not deserve the Nobel
Prize. It reaches up to a point wherein they call him out, including the fact that his partner himself found
the book misleading and distorting the process of scientific discovery. Maurice Wilkins himself, the illegal
provider of the X-ray crystallography data of Rosalind Franklin, spoke of his impartialness in his book The
Double Helix. What had made the documentary sadder was that Watson had no say. This is not entirely
because he refused to be interviewedan interview for him was a trap, set up for him probably to shame
himself. It was not hard to pick up the clueswho would have missed that the other interviewees were
Franklins friends? The title of the documentary is The Secret of Photo 51, but it hardly seemed so.

The scientific community was harsh on females back then, barely even allowing them to enter the
lab. At their time, some females havent been allowed to study. Watson has been raised to think such. While
the idea used to be the social norm, it did not mean that Watson should have the same opinion. As the
documentary implies, his opinion on females in the laboratory is clear by the way he writes about Rosy
in his book.

Articles on Watson nowadays are mostly negative and Franklins work is recognized even in
Wikipedia. Headlines the likes of James Watson deserves to be shunned fill the Google search page. To
make it even worse, there have been reports of him making racist comments, which led him to be kicked
out of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. At present, his academic work is ignored by the community, instead
focusing on his wrong actions.

In my opinion, it is hardly fair, if not at all, for Watson to be treated as such. While he and Crick
may have drawn heavily on the crystallography work of Rosalind Franklin, he has also done his part by
revealing their discovery on the DNA, which, as we all know, has been incredibly helpful to the community,
perhaps more that we care to admit.