Choices and Actions vs. Chance and Fate Theme Analysis

Photograph 51 focuses on a crucial moment in scientist Rosalind Franklin’s career, when she and her lab assistant Ray Gosling take an X-ray image (“Photograph 51”) that holds the key to the structure of DNA. The monumental discovery has the potential to change the world by introducing humanity to the “secret of life.” But Rosalind decides to keep her findings private until she can be certain of what they mean, illustrating her belief in the value of human choice and action over the idea that things are fated to happen at certain moments. Her colleagues James Watson and Francis Crick, however, think that a combination of fate and luck made the discovery happen—and that they were destined to cross paths with Rosalind in order to use her work to their own advantage. Over the course of the play, their belief in chance and fate clash with Rosalind’s staunch faith in free will. Ultimately, however, the play suggests that both decisive action and chance play equally important roles in people’s lives, affecting not only individuals but even the course of history in unpredictable ways.

First, the play explores the possibility that fate has the power to change the course not just of an individual life, but of many lives. “Didn’t she feel that something was at her back, a force greater than she was[?]” asks Francis Crick. (He and James Watson are commenting on the play’s action from an unidentifiable time and place.) “You mean us?” Watson asks. “No. I mean fate,” Crick answers. “What’s the difference?” Watson intones. This exchange suggests that the seemingly random encounters that bring people together and put people on similar or parallel paths may actually be the workings of fate. Specifically, they’re implying that fate is what allowed the two of them to cross paths with Rosalind and Wilkins, enabling them to take credit for Rosalind’s discovery of the structure of DNA and win the Nobel Prize along with Wilkins. In Watson and Crick’s view, fate (“a force greater than [Rosalind] was”), not any of their own decisions, is what formed the chain of events that led to their ability to profit off of her work.

But toward the end of the play, characters also explore the possibility that choice and action alone are what determine the course of a life. In the final scene, Rosalind muses aloud, “I think there must come a point in life when you realize you can’t begin again. That you’ve made the decisions you’ve made and then you live with them or you spend your whole life in regret.” She believes that life is defined by actions and choices—not by the intrusion of fate or random chance. When Wilkins asks whether their lives would have turned out differently had they made different choices earlier on in their professional relationship, Rosalind doesn’t answer him. Though she doesn’t outright agree with him, her silence implies that she’s resigned to the fact that the choices people make determine the outcomes of their lives. And, in Rosalind and Wilkins’s case, it’s too late to “begin again.” Rosalind’s perspective stands counter to Crick and Watson’s earlier suggestion that great, unseen forces steer people’s destinies. She believes that a life is the sum of one’s choices and actions, and nothing more.

Ultimately, though, the play seems to suggest that neither conscious choice nor the whims of fate and chance solely define the course of a life. Instead, the play allows for the possibility that seemingly random twists of fate actually work in tandem with people’s choices and actions. For example, at a 1951 scientific conference in Naples, Wilkins shows Watson (his colleague and rival) the DNA research that he and Rosalind have been working on. After the panel, Watson approaches him. “It’s just incredibly exciting,” Watson rambles, “To be born at the right time. There’s an element of fate to it, don’t you think? And I don’t believe in fate.” This exchange speaks to how fate and chance influence people’s lives. Rosalind Franklin and her colleagues were all “born at the right time”—a random occurrence, of course, but nonetheless important in how their lives and careers take shape (even to rational doctors and scientists who “don’t believe in fate”). But at the same time, Watson, Crick, Rosalind, and Wilkins all freely chose to become scientists. It’s a matter of random chance (or perhaps fate) that they were all born in the same era and that they’re now crossing paths professionally, but choice certainly played a role as well. This confluence of free will and fate is what brings the two pairs of scientists together, setting the stage for Wilkins to show Photograph 51 to Watson and Crick, and for Watson and Crick to take credit for Rosalind’s research and win the Nobel Prize along with Wilkins. The randomness of chance—and, as Watson suggests, the inevitability of fate—collides with the characters’ free will as they try to solve the question of DNA’s structure. Their paths cross by chance, but also because of their individual choices. In this way, action and fate both play a role in allowing these individuals to change the course of history through their intertwined research.