Meet Rosalind Franklin: Photograph 51

The photograph

Working at King's College London in 1952, Franklin and her student Raymond Gosling produced an X-ray diffraction image of the B form of DNA, catalogued as Photograph 51. It is an unusually clear picture, and the cross pattern in it indicates a helix — with the spacing needed to work out the dimensions.

In January 1953 the image was shown to James Watson by Maurice Wilkins, without Franklin's knowledge or permission. Watson and Crick's model followed within weeks. Their 1953 paper acknowledged having been "stimulated by a general knowledge" of the King's work; it did not say they had seen her data.

Not a footnote to someone else's discovery

The framing where she is the wronged assistant undersells her. She was an accomplished physical chemist before DNA, with important work on the structure of coal that remained useful for decades, and after King's she led pioneering studies of virus structure at Birkbeck — work her collaborators continued after her death.

That line above is from a 1940 letter to her father, written when she was nineteen or twenty.

The Nobel that could not include her

She died of ovarian cancer in 1958, aged thirty-seven — plausibly connected to her radiation exposure. The Nobel Prize for the structure of DNA was awarded in 1962 to Watson, Crick and Wilkins. Nobel Prizes are not awarded posthumously, so the question of whether she would have shared it is unanswerable rather than merely unanswered.

Why they belong at your table

Seat her when your work is being used without your name on it, or when you are being asked to accept a story about yourself that is smaller than the truth. She is precise, unsentimental, and entirely uninterested in being a martyr.