This letter highlights Rosalind Franklin’s pivotal role in discovering DNA’s structure: her May 1952 Photograph 51 provided the X‑ray evidence for a double helix. Because Franklin died in 1958, she could not be considered for the 1962 Nobel Prize awarded to James Watson, Francis Crick and Maurice Wilkins. Although Watson’s 1968 memoir criticized Franklin, he later acknowledged in 2000 that her work was indispensable.
Rosalind Franklin’s Photograph 51: The Crucial Evidence Behind Watson’s Nobel
This letter highlights Rosalind Franklin’s pivotal role in discovering DNA’s structure: her May 1952 Photograph 51 provided the X‑ray evidence for a double helix. Because Franklin died in 1958, she could not be considered for the 1962 Nobel Prize awarded to James Watson, Francis Crick and Maurice Wilkins. Although Watson’s 1968 memoir criticized Franklin, he later acknowledged in 2000 that her work was indispensable.
01:45 AM, 11/12/2025Science
Letter to the Editor
James Watson's 1962 Nobel Prize, shared with Francis Crick and Maurice Wilkins, is one of the most widely known honors in modern science. Yet it was British chemist Rosalind Franklin who, in May 1952, produced the decisive X‑ray image — Photograph 51 — that revealed DNA's helical structure and made that discovery possible.
Photograph 51 displayed a clear X‑shaped diffraction pattern consistent with a double helix, contradicting the triple‑helix model then championed by Linus Pauling. Franklin's expertise in X‑ray crystallography and her careful analysis of the data provided the critical physical evidence that allowed others to build the correct molecular model.
Franklin died of ovarian cancer in 1958 at age 37. Because the Nobel Prize is not awarded posthumously, she was not eligible for the 1962 prize awarded to Watson, Crick and Wilkins.
Watson long provoked controversy for his portrayal of Franklin in his 1968 memoir The Double Helix, but he later acknowledged her essential role. In 2000, at the opening of King's College London's Franklin‑Wilkins building, he said Franklin's work was indispensable to solving DNA's structure.
Harold N. Bass, Porter Ranch
Originally published in the Los Angeles Times.