Scientists
Rosalind Franklin
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Rosalind Franklin used X-ray diffraction at King's College London to study the molecular structure of DNA, work that in 1952 produced Photograph 51, a sharp image of the B form of DNA that made its helical structure visible. In January 1953, without her knowledge or permission, her colleague Maurice Wilkins showed the photograph to James Watson, and Franklin's own unpublished data reached Francis Crick soon after; both fed directly into the double helix model Watson and Crick published that April, which credited Franklin only in a footnote as an unpublished source. Franklin died of ovarian cancer in 1958, four years before the Nobel Prize for the DNA structure was awarded to Watson, Crick, and Wilkins; Nobel Prizes are not given posthumously, so whether she would have shared it is debated, but her data's role in the model is not.
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Birth YearSourced to the subject's own account Death DateSourced to the subject's own account Death YearSourced to the subject's own account FieldSourced to the subject's own accountChemistry and X-ray crystallography 1 Cross-Tradition Connections
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