He claims the image gave him the eureka moment that led to the discovery. In it, he wrote that without Franklin’s consent, he was shown an X-ray image she took of DNA, known as Photograph 51. The story commonly told about their ensuing discovery stems from Watson’s 1968 book, called The Double Helix. Meanwhile, Franklin and her colleague Maurice Wilkins, a man who also received the Nobel Prize, worked on the experimental side at King’s College, using X-ray imaging to examine the molecule.
In the 1950s, Watson and Crick studied DNA at the University of Cambridge from a theoretical perspective, trying to represent its structure using cardboard cutouts, according to an editorial in Nature accompanying the opinion. “She deserves to be remembered not as the victim of the double helix, but as an equal contributor to the solution of the structure,” Matthew Cobb, a zoologist at the University of Manchester in England, and Nathaniel Comfort, a historian of medicine at Johns Hopkins University, write in the opinion article. Now, in an opinion piece published Tuesday in the journal Nature, two researchers argue that while Franklin faced discrimination and did not receive due credit for her contributions, she was a more active participant in the discovery of the double helix than history gives her credit for. James Watson and Francis Crick, two scientists who later won a Nobel Prize for their research on DNA, are said to have stolen data from the chemist Rosalind Franklin that played a key role in their breakthrough.
This groundbreaking principle-that DNA was made of two intertwined strands-could be considered one of the most important biological findings of the 20th century, according to the National Human Genome Research Institute.īut the story behind this revelation is one of scientific impropriety and sexism. Around 70 years ago, scientists discovered the double helix structure of DNA.
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