Franklin, then just shy of her 32^nd birthday and working as a research chemist at King’s College in London, had to rush off to a meeting at the Royal Society and so didn’t wait around for the full image to come into focus. (Raymond Gosling, a young Ph.D. student was there to run the machine in her absence.) But on May 2, 1952, when she returned to her lab to see the crystallographic picture of DNA—the 51^st photograph she had taken—the image was beautiful. It “showed a stark x, formed of tigerish black stripes radiating out from the center,” writes Brenda Maddox in her wonderful biography, Rosalind Franklin: The Dark Lady of DNA. “The spaces between the arms of the x were completely blank. It was the clearest picture ever taken of the B form of DNA, unquestionably a helix.”

It was that picture—capturing the helical structure of DNA—that refocused the thinking of James Watson and Francis Crick, who would announce their own discovery of the structure of life’s molecular building block less than two years later.

The way they got to view that crystallographic image—Franklin’s research colleague, Maurice Wilkins, showed it to Watson without Franklin’s knowledge or approval—remains a matter of some controversy, which Anna Ziegler captures in her play, Photograph 51. As for Franklin, who died of ovarian cancer in 1958 at the age of 37, she never quite got her due.

Four years later the Nobel Prize went to Watson, Crick, and Wilkins.

While the Prize itself is awarded only to living people (a fact that spares any blame to the Nobel committee for slighting Franklin), the history of science, say many, has glossed over her central role in the discovery.

One can find a similar pattern in the life and work of Austrian-born physicist Lise Meitner. (Ruth Lewin Sime’s 1996 biography on Meitner, which I read last year, is a classic and very much worth reading.) Meitner’s work in elucidating the process of nuclear fission in 1938 is well accepted by her fellow physicists—but Otto Hahn, who won the 1944 Nobel Prize in Chemistry “for his discovery of the fission of heavy nuclei,” barely acknowledged her contribution. The same, unfortunately, goes for some textbooks.

It may come as a surprise to non-scientists, but science itself is about as “old boy network” as it comes. As much as recent efforts to encourage women in STEM education and STEM jobs have helped move the needle a bit, the culture of science has often made life for women scientists harder than it already is—excluding them from clubby publishing and peer review networks and sometimes outright snubbing their achievements. (See Jane Lee’s good post from a few years back in National Geographic.)

If we’re going to make progress in gender equity in science, technology, math, and engineering, we need to dive in—frankly and honestly—to the cultural barriers that stand in the way. Those barriers don’t disappear after high school.

Happy International Women’s Day, everyone. Celebrate a woman scientist today.

DIGITAL HEALTH

Mayo Clinic finds IBM Watson boost in clinical trial enrollment. A new Mayo Clinic study finds that the use of IBM's Watson for Clinical Trial matching system was able to boost breast cancer clinical study partnership by 80%. “Watson is able to give us faster, better matching of patients to potential clinical trials that our oncologists wouldn’t have otherwise be able to see — and I sit with our oncologists who work on this kind of thing,” Christopher Ross, CIO at the Mayo Clinic, told MobiHealthNews in an interview. (MobiHealthNews)

INDICATIONS

Merck shells out $300 million to partner Eisai in cancer drug deal. U.S. drug giant Merck is paying $300 million in a deal possibly worth more than $5 billion to partner Eisai in an effort to boost its star cancer immunotherapy treatment Keytruda, which could match up well in a combination with Eisai's Lenvima.  (Reuters)

THE BIG PICTURE

Cigna-Express Scripts cometh. Watch out, CVS/Aetna—there's another benefits manager/insurer marriage on the horizon. Cigna announced Wednesday that it had agreed to buy pharmacy benefits manager Express Scripts for $54 billion in cash and stock—and just as Scripts is set to lose its biggest client. We'll have much more on this. (Fortune)

REQUIRED READING

Uber, Lyft, Walmart, and Amazon Are Coming to Fortune Brainstorm Tech 2018, by Adam Lashinsky

For Brands Celebrating International Women's Day 2018, Inspirational Messages Aren't Enough Anymore, by Claire Zillman

Snap Prepares for a Fresh Round of Job Cuts, by David Meyer

Bitcoin's Price Wobbles as Japan Cracks Down on Cryptocurrency Exchanges, by Flora Carr