#dnadoublehelix

The unsung heroine of DNA.

Franklin is best known for her work on the X-ray diffraction images of DNA, particularly Photo 51, while at King's College London, which led to the discovery of the DNA double helix for which James Watson, Francis Crick and Maurice Wilkins shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1962. The Nobel committee does not give posthumous prizes.

Rosalind Franklin was in the Biophysical laboratory at King’s College London from 1951. There she conducted work on DNA using X-Ray diffraction to study the structure and chemical make-up of DNA, at the time unknown to science (or anyone for that matter). X-Ray diffraction bounces X-rays off a crystallised object and observes how they scatter, this scattering or diffraction giving information on the structure of the object being analysed. Franklin took images of DNA via this method including the famous ‘Image 51’, later used by Watson and Crick to support their findings of DNA’s double helix in 1953. But the use of Image 51 by Watson and Crick was not known to Franklin as her data was not yet published. Her photographs were given to Watson and Crick by their friend, Maurice Wilkins, who worked in the same laboratory as Franklin but was known to clash with her. Wilkins’ effort to show Watson and Crick image 51 may not have been intended as spiteful, but it resulted directly in a lack of recognition for Rosalind Franklin’s role in the discovery of the DNA double helix. Despite Franklin’s work being considered crucial by Watson, she was not jointly awarded the Nobel Prize with them, that privilege instead going to Wilkins. Supposedly she could not be recognised for her contribution as by the time the award was received in 1962 she had sadly passed away with ovarian cancer at just 37.

— J. D. Bernal, 1958. Franklin's X-ray diagram of the B form of sodium thymonucleate (DNA) fibres, published in Nature on 25 April 1953, shows “in striking manner the features characteristic of helical structures”