![]() ![]() ![]() This happened without Franklin’s knowledge. In 1953, when Franklin was preparing to leave King’s College to pursue other research elsewhere, Wilkins showed Photograph 51 to Watson, who was visiting King’s. Photograph 51 is the title of a play written by Franklin’s friend Anna Ziegler Nicole Kidman played the role of Franklin in a 2015 staging of the play at London’s West End. The name is as iconic as the image itself. Photograph 51 displays the way X-rays are scattered off a pure fibre of DNA. Wilkins too was at King’s then, while Watson and Crick were with the University of Cambridge. ![]() ![]() While they acknowledge and describe the exact details of Franklin’s contribution, they write that Watson and Crick solved the puzzle through their own efforts, and that they used data from Franklin and others (without permission) to confirm their findings.Īt the heart of the popular narrative is Photograph 51, an X-ray image taken at King’s College London in 1952 by Franklin and her graduate student Raymond Gosling. Cobb is writing Crick’s biography and Comfort is separately writing Watson’s. Some things need to be viewed in perspective here. In a comment article in the same journal, zoologist Matthew Cobb and medical historian Nathaniel Comfort argue that far from being a victim, Franklin was an equal contributor to the effort that went into the discovery of DNA structure. Now, 70 years after Watson and Crick published their seminal results in Nature, two researchers have sought to revisit the narrative that presents Franklin as a victim. ![]()
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