The Woman Who Discovered the Structure of DNA Got Almost None of the Credit for It

 In 1953 James Watson and Francis Crick published a landmark paper describing the double helix structure of DNA. It is one of the most important scientific discoveries in history. Watson and Crick won the Nobel Prize in 1962.

Rosalind Franklin did not win a Nobel Prize. She died of cancer in 1958 at age 37. The Nobel is not awarded posthumously.

But without Rosalind Franklin's work Watson and Crick might not have cracked the structure of DNA when they did. Or possibly at all.

What Franklin Did

Rosalind Franklin was a chemist and X-ray crystallographer working at King's College London in the early 1950s. She was applying X-ray diffraction techniques to study the structure of DNA molecules.

X-ray crystallography works by firing X-rays at a crystallized substance and analyzing the pattern of how the rays scatter. By analyzing those patterns an expert can determine the arrangement of atoms in the molecule.

Franklin was exceptionally skilled at this technique. In May of 1952 she produced an X-ray diffraction image of DNA that has since become one of the most famous photographs in the history of science. It is called Photo 51.

Photo 51 clearly showed the helical structure of DNA. It provided crucial data about the dimensions and structure of the molecule.

What Happened to Photo 51

Without Franklin's knowledge or permission her colleague Maurice Wilkins showed Photo 51 to James Watson in January of 1953.

Watson has described in his own memoir seeing the photo and immediately recognizing its significance. He and Crick used the data from that image, along with data from Franklin's unpublished reports that had also been shared without her knowledge, to build their model of the DNA double helix.

Franklin was not told that her work had been used. She was not consulted or credited in the Watson and Crick paper beyond a footnote acknowledging that her work had stimulated them. The footnote significantly understated her contribution.

Watson and Crick won the Nobel Prize. Wilkins shared it with them. Franklin was not eligible because she had died. Whether she would have been included if she had lived is something historians still debate. The Nobel committee's record of crediting women for scientific work was not strong.

Why This Pattern Kept Happening

The story of Rosalind Franklin is not unique. It is one of dozens of cases in the history of science where women did foundational work that men received primary credit for.

Lise Meitner did the theoretical work that explained nuclear fission. Her male collaborator won the Nobel. Jocelyn Bell Burnell discovered pulsars as a graduate student. Her advisor won the Nobel. Chien-Shiung Wu conducted a groundbreaking physics experiment that disproved a fundamental law. The men who proposed the experiment won the Nobel.

The pattern reflects something about who the scientific establishment recognized and rewarded. The work got done. The recognition went somewhere else.

Franklin's contribution is now widely acknowledged in the history of science. She has a research institute named after her. Photo 51 is famous. But for decades her role was minimized in the standard telling of one of the 20th century's greatest scientific achievements.

Her name belongs in that story. It always did.

Robert Lee Beers III is a writer and digital preservation advocate based in North Charleston South Carolina.