Story 01 · Genes and medicine
The X-ray photo behind the double helix
An X-ray image made in Rosalind Franklin's lab gave key evidence for the shape of DNA, but it was shown to rivals without her knowledge, and she was left out of the famous story for years.
- Rosalind Franklin and Photo 51
- London and Cambridge, United Kingdom
- 1953
- 3 min read
On this page
Before you readWhat would you do?
A colleague shares a draft report that a junior team member wrote. You use its key chart in your presentation to the boss. What is the fair thing to do?
Pick an answer now. The file tells you whether you were right.
01The file in one minute
1The photo
In May 1952 Raymond Gosling, working under Rosalind Franklin, took a very clear X-ray image of DNA, later called Photo 51.
2The shortcut
In January 1953 it was shown to James Watson without Franklin's knowledge, and it helped him and Crick propose the double helix.
3The credit
Franklin died in 1958. The 1962 Nobel Prize went to Watson, Crick and Wilkins, and her role was overlooked for years.
4The lesson for AI
AI is built on other people's data. Know where data came from, and give credit.
02Timeline
May 1952
Photo 51 is taken in Franklin's lab at King's College London.
January 1953
Maurice Wilkins shows the photo to James Watson.
25 April 1953
Nature publishes the double helix paper alongside Franklin and Gosling's paper.
1958
Franklin dies of ovarian cancer, aged 37.
1962
Watson, Crick and Wilkins receive the Nobel Prize.
03The story
In the early 1950s several teams were racing to work out the structure of DNA, the molecule that carries genetic information. At King's College London, the chemist Rosalind Franklin was using X-ray crystallography, which means firing X-rays through a sample and reading the pattern they make. In May 1952 her PhD student Raymond Gosling, working under her direction, took an especially clear image of DNA. It became known as Photo 51.
In January 1953 Franklin's colleague Maurice Wilkins showed the photo to James Watson from Cambridge, without Franklin's knowledge. Watson and Francis Crick also saw a research report that included her measurements. Combined with their own model building, this helped them propose the double helix.
Their paper appeared in Nature on 25 April 1953, alongside a paper by Franklin and Gosling and one by Wilkins's group. Franklin moved on to important work on viruses and died of ovarian cancer in 1958, aged 37. In 1962 Watson, Crick and Wilkins received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. The prize is not given to people who have died, and for years her role was barely mentioned.
04What the science says
Watson and Crick's model was a real achievement, and it relied on careful data that someone else had produced. How that data reached them, and how little credit Franklin got at first, is now widely seen as unfair. Historians today describe the discovery as the work of several people.
The AI angle: AI models are built on huge amounts of data made by other people, such as writing, photos, code and research. Being clear about where data came from, and giving credit, is part of using it fairly.
The idea behind this caseLesson: How machines learn →
05What to take from it
- Ask where the key data behind a result came from, and who produced it.
- Give credit to everyone whose work you build on, especially people who are easy to overlook.
- Get permission before sharing someone else's unpublished work.
- When you use AI-generated text or images, check what sources they rely on and cite real sources.
07 — Sources
- Molecular Configuration in Sodium Thymonucleate (Franklin and Gosling) · Nature · 1953-04-25
- The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 1962 · NobelPrize.org · 1962
- Rosalind Franklin: A Crucial Contribution · Nature Education (Scitable) · 2008