The Dark Lady of DNA: should Rosalind Franklin have won the Nobel Prize?

 Gareth Williams, Emeritus Professor of Medicine, University of Bristol
Author of Unravelling the Double Helix: the lost heroes of DNA.

Cracking the double helical structure of DNA was one of the triumphs of 20th-century science but it took much more than James Watson and Francis Crick, who effectively clicked into place the final pieces of a gigantic jigsaw puzzle assembled over several decades.

The role of Rosalind Franklin, the ‘Dark Lady of DNA’, became especially controversial when Watson vilified her in his book The Double Helix. Here, Professor Gareth Williams analyses her significance in the discovery that won the Nobel Prize for Watson, Crick and Maurice Wilkins, ‘the third man of DNA’.