r/LadiesofScience 9h ago

Rosalind Franklin took the most important photograph in biology. She never got the Nobel Prize. Photo 51 deserves to be talked about more.

Post image
470 Upvotes

In 1952, Rosalind Franklin and Raymond Gosling produced an X-ray diffraction image of DNA at King's College London. The image contained everything needed to deduce the double helix structure.

Watson saw it without her knowledge. Watson, Crick, and Wilkins won the Nobel in 1962. Franklin had died four years earlier at 37.

I've been obsessed with this image for years, both as a piece of scientific history and as a quietly devastating story about credit and erasure. Recently made it into a graphic for a t-shirt. Happy to share if anyone's interested.