Stories: Whose are told and whose remain in the margins?

 As a future bio teacher, this question is important to bring up. Biology isn't just a science. It's the story of life and many things get put in the way of it, including religion, ideology, beliefs in an unknown, history, sexism, etc. Many, many, many, stories do get marginalized, in fact, many people in science get marginalized too. 

I think the best example of this would be Rosalind Franklin and the worse men to ever live in the history of science; James Watson and Francis Crick. (it's not just because of this story that I am not a big fan of them, it is also just cause they were terrible people) Now a lot of people know this story so I won't go into too much detail but I will shorten it to this. Franklin discovered the shape of DNA and how it was actually a double helix. Because she wanted more insight on her discovery, she and a colleague actually consulted and shared it with Watson and Crick. Then these two took her discovery, claimed it as their own in their research, and won the noble prize for it. It wasn't until years after Franklin's death, that she even really got credit for making the discovery and the story is told today in most science classrooms. 

Now work being published and stolen isn't new to science but this story can be a really great way to introduce the idea of marginalization in Biology and how there is a lot of work to end it. Franklin was marginalized for multiple reasons. The biggest was that she was a woman and at the time women were not supposed to be scientists. Because she was a woman and was doing things that were unheard of for women at the time, a lot of accounts of her are that she was "confrontational" or even " intense", which may have been true but it definitely wasn't because of her gender. Science is hard and making discoveries are intense. She didn't get credit for her discovery either until much later, and if we're honest, a lot of accounts of this woman were in Watson's own memoir. 

But all these facts aside, teaching this as a lesson in how much better the field of biology is becoming as an all-inclusive science, is actually pretty important. In the end, while Franklin was marginalized and wasn't able to enjoy any credit for her work, she now has received most if not all the credit she deserved. This has also opened the field for many other women to study biology in many different ways! It's this story too that inspires many women to want to join the genetics fields and be scientists like Rosalind Franklin. After all, she helped pave the way for us girls to prove that women belong in science.  





image from: https://time.com/5793551/rosalind-franklin-100-women-of-the-year/


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