Rebecca Fernandez

...no, I hadn't heard of Linus Pauling prior to reading up on Watson & Crick. I asked a few other lay people and none had heard about Pauling or Franklin, so I assumed, perhaps wrongly, that their names were unknown to most other individuals outside of the field. Certainly they didn't make any of the textbooks I had in high school or college, which were non-major science courses, and likely dumbed down. (Madame Curie and Watson & Crick of course did.)

I appreciate the link to the Nature article; unfortunately I don't have access to more than the first paragraph or so. I did see a recent article that mentioned their agreement to publish several papers simultaneously, but that did not seem to outweigh the minimal credit given to Franklin in the landmark discovery paper.

If I have made an error in history, mea culpa, and I would appreciate an indication of where you see a problem. My timeline comes from the sources cited in the article plus another book about Rosalind Franklin specifically. I tried to draw from the other two in because they seemed more balanced.

Best,
Rebecca

Can you elaborate? I've never heard criticism of this aspect, in fact, the opposite. For example, I often hear doctors refer to studies in peer-reviewed journals as the industry standard, and they tend to be critical of, say, chiropractic studies that are not published there.

I think you're right about tenure. I have seen firsthand how it can shape allowable research and curb topics that are out of fashion. Although hopefully once tenure is received, the incentives are greater to research for discovery rather than publication.