Structure of DNA

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

James Watson and Francis Crick published their model of the DNA double helix in Nature in April 1953, and the achievement earned them, together with Maurice Wilkins, the 1962 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. What their published paper acknowledged only briefly was how directly their model depended on data that was not theirs: unpublished X-ray diffraction images and measurements produced by Rosalind Franklin, a crystallographer working at King's College London, chief among them an image known as Photograph 51, which Wilkins showed Watson without Franklin's knowledge or permission.

Franklin's own analysis of her data had already narrowed in on the helical structure and several of its key dimensions before Watson and Crick built their model; historians of science who have since reconstructed the sequence of events generally agree that her contribution was substantive rather than merely confirmatory, and that the credit she received at the time, a brief footnote-level acknowledgment, did not reflect how much of the model rested on her work.

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Rosalind Franklin died in 1958, of ovarian cancer, at thirty-seven years old, four years before the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was awarded for the discovery her own X-ray data had helped make possible. The Nobel Foundation's own rules do not allow posthumous awards, so her death alone would have closed the question of whether she might have shared the 1962 prize with Watson, Crick and Wilkins, independent of any argument about how the credit should have been divided while she was alive.

The dispute over how fairly Franklin was credited during her lifetime is not the same question as whether she would have won a Nobel Prize had she lived, and the two are often run together in popular retellings. What is well documented is narrower and, in a way, more damning: her unpublished data reached Watson and Crick without her knowledge, and the paper that used it credited her role as supporting evidence for a model that had, by the historical record, already substantially been hers to make.