Google 1, National Geographic 0

Google’s doodle for today honors Rosalind Franklin, the Cambridge-trained scientist and photographer whose photos of DNA strands enabled other researchers to nail down the structure of the basic building block of genetics.

If you click on the doodle, it takes you to a search result page that includes this story from National Geographic. I couldn’t believe that publication refers to Franklin as a “Legendary Female Scientist”.

What the hell? She was a meticulous and dedicated researcher, who died much too young and was subsequently denied Nobel recognition that other DNA explorers (notably Watson and Crick)—who actually used her photos to advance their studies without her knowledge—were granted.

(The Nobel committee doesn’t award prizes posthumously, and Franklin died in 1958, four years before Crick and Watson received theirs.)

I find it nothing short of bizarre that National G would qualify their commentary on Google’s honor by designating her a “female scientist”.

You’d have expected that in the 1950s; not in 2013. Grow the hell up, National Geographic.