The Greatest Trade Secret Heist
the World Has Ever Known?

by Steve McDaniel, JD, PhD Technology Litigators

So, can a trade secret thief benefit from his heist and walk away totally unscathed? Oh yeah. Can the scoundrel make a ton of money from it right under the nose of the rightful owner? You bet. Does society sometimes even reward the rogue for his sticky fingers? Sure.

Take the peculiar case of Dr. Franklin, the undisputed rightful owner of what might be the greatest chemical trade secret of all time. Don’t know Dr. Franklin? Dr. R. Franklin? Dr. Rosalind Elsie Franklin of King’s College London (known fondly to the thieves, her trusted colleagues, as “Rosy”)? Still doesn’t ring a bell? OK, let’s go at this from a different angle.

The things you gotta prove to show some one is guilty of trade secret theft generally are:

1. The plaintiff owned a trade secret.

2. The defendant used or disclosed the trade secret, in violation of a confidential or contractual relationship with the plaintiff, or after acquiring the trade secret by improper means, or after acquiring the trade secret from a third party with notice that the disclosure was improper.

3. The plaintiff suffered injury, such injury, by way of example, including value lost by plaintiff or value gained by defendant.

With that in mind, ever heard of Watson and Crick? Yep, THAT James Watson and Francis Crick - of Nobel Laureate fame AND fortune.

Rosalind Franklin was a very good x-ray diffraction researcher, and was hired to do that by King’s College in England. She was already well-known for her work on the X-ray diffraction images of carbon-based molecules like coal before arriving, so she continued her trade at King’s College by focusing her ample skill set at unraveling the structure of DNA. There were a bunch of guys in the U.K. working on the structure of DNA, including Linus Pauling – a Nobel laureate known for his x-ray diffraction model of collagen (the building block protein of skin). This “old boy’s club” also included Watson and Crick. It also included Maurice Wilkins, a colleague of Franklin at King’s College, who had a thinly-veiled, and well-known, turf war going on with her.

Franklin started working at King’s College in early 1951. By
January 1953, she had assembled her data and had written three
manuscripts, two of which included a double helical DNA back-
bone. Had that been the whole of it, there is little doubt that she
would have been proclaimed as one of the discoverers of the
DNA structure, with all the acclaim, money and influence that
would accord.