Mother of DNA

By Elizabeth Cannon

When most people think of famous scientists, they often think of men like James Watson and Francis Crick, credited with discovering DNA structure and how DNA worked. However, these discoveries and many others can be attributed to women. Most of the time, especially in the twentieth century, these women did not receive recognition for their work. Due to this, they were more often than not forgotten by the modern age. 

The most famous example of this is Rosalind Franklin. Franklin was a chemist and Crystallographer and she worked at King’s College in Cambridge where she made a revolutionary discovery about DNA. In May of 1952, Franklin and her student, Raymond Gosling, took one of the most important pictures in scientific history. The photograph is called “Photo 51” and shows the helical structure of DNA in a viewable way by the naked eye. It also allowed scientists to figure out the double helix structure of DNA when it was previously thought to be a single helix. However, Maurice Wilkins, a scientist who also worked at King’s College, showed the photograph to Francis Crick and James Watson without Rosalind Franklin’s permission. This allowed Watson and Crick to view the structure of DNA and develop a chemical model of it. In 1962, Watson, Francis, and Crick were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in Medicine and Physiology. Franklin was never given a Nobel Prize for her efforts and was only credited with a mention in the footnote of the paper that won these three men their prize. Fifty years later, when the 1962 Nobel Peace Prize nominations were released to the public, it was revealed that Rosalind Franklin was never even nominated for that category. One of the largest arguments in defense of Watson, Francis, and Crick, is that Franklin could not have been nominated, since she had died in 1958, four years before they won the Nobel Peace Prize. However, the rule about post-death nominations and awards was only officially established in 1974, almost two decades after her death and twelve years after the 1962 Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to Watson, Francis, and Crick. 

This unfortunate oversight resulted in her being mostly forgotten by people working in science or taking science classes. However, she is responsible for discovering the structure of DNA and taking the first picture of it. Overall, people most often think of Watson and Crick when they think about DNA when instead, they should be thinking about Rosalind Franklin, the mother of DNA.