This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Rosalind Franklin died in 1958, of ovarian cancer, at thirty-seven years old, four years before the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was awarded for the discovery her own X-ray data had helped make possible. The Nobel Foundation's own rules do not allow posthumous awards, so her death alone would have closed the question of whether she might have shared the 1962 prize with Watson, Crick and Wilkins, independent of any argument about how the credit should have been divided while she was alive.
The dispute over how fairly Franklin was credited during her lifetime is not the same question as whether she would have won a Nobel Prize had she lived, and the two are often run together in popular retellings. What is well documented is narrower and, in a way, more damning: her unpublished data reached Watson and Crick without her knowledge, and the paper that used it credited her role as supporting evidence for a model that had, by the historical record, already substantially been hers to make.