Chemist Rosalind Franklin died sixty years ago today, on April 16, 1958, without recognition for her vital work in discovering the structure of DNA.
In May of 1952, one of Franklin's graduate students at King's College London, Raymond Gosling, took a photograph of the way a strand of DNA scatters an X-ray beam. That pattern can reveal important things about the crystal structure of a material, and researchers at the time were trying to figure out the structure of DNA. Gosling took the photograph, but Franklin was directing his work.
Without Franklin's permission or knowledge, her fellow researcher Maurice Wilkins showed the photograph to James Watson, who used it to develop a model of the chemical structure of DNA. Watson and his research partner Francis Crick published their work in the journal Nature in 1953. Wilkins published his own work in the same issue of the journal - and so did Franklin, in a paper co-authored with her graduate student Gosling.
A decade later, Wilkins shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Watson and Crick for discovering the spiralling ladder structure of DNA and its role in heredity. Franklin, whose lab produced the photograph that helped unravel the mystery of DNA, received no credit for her role until after her death. Since the Nobel Prize committee doesn't confer awards posthumously, it means that Franklin will never share in the scientific community's highest honor for her work.
In fact, if not for Franklin's early death, she might eventually have had two Nobel Prizes. At the time of her death, she was working on the molecular structure of viruses with her colleague Aaron Klug, who received a Nobel Prize for the work in 1982.
Did Watson and Crick deny Franklin her share of the credit on purpose, either out of sexism or simple cutthroat competitiveness? History hasn't produced a consensus on that point. Franklin herself, in response to Watson and Crick's paper, said only, "We all stand on each other's shoulders."
Watson, in his published account of his research, was harshly critical of Franklin, though he included a conciliatory note in the epilogue.
And Gosling, who actually took the fateful photograph, received even less credit than Franklin, which is unfortunate but also not surprising given his status as a PhD student at the time. Nature's PastCast podcast interviewd Gosling in 2013, and you can listen to his story, including his remembrance of Franklin, here.
