The Image That Should Have Her Name On It
September 5, 2026 · by White Nights
In May 1952, at King's College London, Rosalind Franklin used X-ray crystallography to capture the sharpest image of DNA ever produced. She labelled it Photo 51. It showed, in the distinctive X-pattern of X-ray diffraction, that DNA was a double helix.
Franklin knew what she was looking at. She had already calculated the dimensions of the helix, the spacing of the base pairs, the water content of the molecule. She was systematic and careful in a way that her colleague Maurice Wilkins was not, and their working relationship was notoriously difficult, partly because Wilkins had initially mistaken her for a technical assistant rather than a scientist of equal standing.
In January 1953, Wilkins showed Photo 51 to James Watson without Franklin's knowledge or consent. Watson later described the moment in his memoir The Double Helix: he saw it and his mouth fell open. The image confirmed the structure he and Francis Crick had been trying to model. They published their paper in Nature in April 1953, acknowledging Franklin's work only obliquely.
Franklin died of ovarian cancer in 1958, aged 37. In 1962, Watson, Crick, and Wilkins were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for the discovery of the DNA structure. The Nobel Prize is not awarded posthumously.
The extent to which Watson and Crick's breakthrough depended on Franklin's data has been debated and contested for decades. What is clear is that Photo 51 was critical, that Franklin did not know it had been shared, and that she received no credit in the Nobel citation. The image is one of the most important photographs in the history of science. Her name is not on it.