Photograph 51

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

James Watson and Francis Crick published their model of the DNA double helix in Nature in April 1953, and the achievement earned them, together with Maurice Wilkins, the 1962 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. What their published paper acknowledged only briefly was how directly their model depended on data that was not theirs: unpublished X-ray diffraction images and measurements produced by Rosalind Franklin, a crystallographer working at King's College London, chief among them an image known as Photograph 51, which Wilkins showed Watson without Franklin's knowledge or permission.

Franklin's own analysis of her data had already narrowed in on the helical structure and several of its key dimensions before Watson and Crick built their model; historians of science who have since reconstructed the sequence of events generally agree that her contribution was substantive rather than merely confirmatory, and that the credit she received at the time, a brief footnote-level acknowledgment, did not reflect how much of the model rested on her work.