How to Fly a Horse: The Secret History of Creation, Invention, and Discovery

Chapter 5 is bookended by the story of Rosalind Franklin to illustrate the debate of how and whether to give credit to new ideas. Franklin was a scientist who studied the structure of crystals (called a “crystallographer”), which led her to the nascent field of virus research in the 1950s. Through this work, she discovered the structure of RNA. She died young from cancer, in 1958, and Ashton writes that James Watson, Francis Crick, and Maurice Wilkins stole her work and later received the Nobel Prize for research based on it. He then goes on to review the discrimination women faced that prevented them from scientific work for centuries. Even when finally allowed to work, women received little credit and few prizes for their efforts.

A man named Robert Merton studied the “sociology of science.” He concluded that practitioners of science are not as objective as the discipline itself claims to be. He also believed that assigning credit for ideas to a single individual is problematic. It does not account for the aspects of many others’ work that leads one to a discovery. Newton referred to this when he spoke of “standing on the shoulders of giants” (130).