Graffitied blue plaque goes on display at Whipple Museum in Cambridge to recognise Rosalind Franklin’s role in DNA discovery

A blue plaque that was repeatedly graffitied to acknowledge Rosalind Franklin’s enormous contribution to the understanding of DNA has gone on display in a Cambridge museum.

Previously installed outside The Eagle pub in Bene’t Street, the plaque commemorates the groundbreaking discovery of the structure of DNA in the nearby Cavendish Laboratory.

It was in this pub in 1953 that Francis Crick and James Watson announced that they had discovered the double-helix structure of DNA.

But the plaque failed to recognise Rosalind Franklin’s contribution to the discovery and was repeatedly scrawled with “+ FRANKLIN” to acknowledge the pivotal role she played.

On Saturday (September 21), the Whipple Museum in Cambridge put the plaque on display alongside Franklin’s own handwritten DNA research notes from early 1953.

“We can see the Eagle blue plaque graffiti as guerilla history of science,” said the museum’s director, Dr Joshua Nall. “The contributions made by women scientists have long been under-recognised, and for some anonymous graffiti artists, recognition wasn’t coming quickly enough. The Whipple Museum is committed to telling the history of science in its broadest sense, and so we were thrilled to give the old plaque a new home.”

“The ‘annotated’ plaque prompted a huge amount of debate and became a well-known landmark,” says Penny Heath, chair of the Cambridge Past, Present & Future blue plaque committee. “We were delighted to install an updated plaque in 2023, and to enable the Whipple Museum to keep the memory of the discussion alive with their acquisition of the old plaque.”

The new version commemorates Crick, Watson - and for the first time, “Rosalind Franklin, Maurice Wilkins and other scientists”. The original plaque, complete with graffiti, was acquired by the Whipple Museum of the History of Science, and will now be displayed alongside Franklin’s own 1953 DNA research notebook, on loan from Churchill Archives Centre.