Rosalind Franklin: The True DNA Discoverer?

Rosalind Franklin was a famous chemist whose research and discovery work in the 1950s led to the comprehension of the structure of DNA. There was a lot of controversy surrounding the discovery of the structure and who should receive credit for "the double helix." In 1962, four years after Franklin's death at the age of 37, three other chemists, James Watson, Francis Crick, and Maurice Wilkins received a Nobel Prize for the double helix model of DNA. How did the other chemists beat her to it and was Rosalind Franklin cheated out of the Nobel Prize?

Franklin was born in 1920, and by the age of 15 she already knew she was going to be a scientist. Franklin went to Newnham College in 1938 and then Cambridge University in 1945. After graduating from Cambridge, Franklin spent three years in Paris learning X-ray diffraction techniques. In 1951, she went to work at King's College as a research associate for John Randall. There, her and Maurice Wilkins worked as peers although Wilkins misunderstood Franklin's role and treated her as an assistant. It was at King's College that Randall gave Franklin the task of explaining the structure of DNA.

To determine the structure of DNA, Franklin used a technique called X-ray crystallography. This allowed the location of atoms in any crystal to be mapped by looking at the image of the crystal under an X-ray beam. By using this technique, Franklin produced the clearest X-ray images of crystallized DNA ever. From these X-rays, Franklin determined that DNA's structure depended on an external backbone, with bases inside and identified the location of the phosphate sugars. After making this breakthrough, Randall presented Franklin's data and unpublished conclusions at a routine seminar. What occurred after this seminar is where the story becomes a controversy.