[SolaceQuantum]

" you have to wonder what has become of ethics, of integrity in science"

When was there any more ethics or integrity in science than any other time? The AIDS crisis was a shitshow of choosing prestige and recognition over the lives of a generation. The discovery of DNA was off a woman who was hardly recognized. Henrietta Lacks' cells. The syphilis experiments.

[dekhn]

The discovery of DNA was done by Friedrich Meischer, a brilliant Swiss biologist. At the time, nobody knew what the nuclein he purified did (and, the results were considered so surprising that his own thesis advisor redid all the experiments manually before letting the data be published).

What you are referring to is the use of Rosalind Franklin's X-ray fibre diffraction images by Watson and Crick to elucidate the 3D structure of DNA, and, depending on the accounts you read, whether she got due credit is arguable. She did publish in the same Nature journal issue as W&C (https://www.nature.com/articles/171740a0.pdf), she got credit for the photos (see the acknowledgements in the W&C paper, http://www.nature.com/genomics/human/watson-crick/), and she was dead by the time the Nobel Prize decision was made (so she could not have received the prize).

I understand many feel very strongly that she was cheated, and while I do believe she was definitely slighted and not given enough credit, the underlying story is fairly complicated. I recommend reading both Dark Lady and Eighth Day of Creation and then forming your own opinion. personally I thought her personal diaries, which she willed to Aaron Klug and were used in the writing of Eighth Day, were really illuminating.

[SolaceQuantum]

Sorry, you're right, the story is complicated, but that it is so complicated draws further the question- where are we getting the idea that science was full of ethical humans doing purely ethical things?