The Photograph

Rosalind Franklin's X-ray diffraction image of the B form of DNA, known as Photograph 51, was taken in 1952 at King's College London with her student Raymond Gosling. It shows a cross pattern that indicates a helix, and the spacing of the layer lines gives the dimensions.

In January 1953 Maurice Wilkins showed the image to James Watson without Franklin's knowledge or permission. Watson has described the moment in his own account. Separately, an unpublished report of Franklin's work, submitted to the Medical Research Council, reached Watson and Crick through Max Perutz. The Watson and Crick model was published in April 1953.

The 1962 Nobel Prize went to Watson, Crick and Wilkins. Franklin had died of ovarian cancer in 1958, at thirty-seven. The prize is not awarded posthumously, so the question of whether she would have shared it cannot be settled.

This much is documented and not seriously disputed. What has been oversimplified is the picture on either side of it.

The version in which Franklin was an unwitting technician whose data was stolen understates her. She was an accomplished crystallographer who had already done significant work on coal structure and would go on to foundational work on virus structure. Her notebooks show she had determined the phosphate backbone was on the outside and had established key parameters, and she was proceeding by a rigorous route that would have got there.

The version in which everything was normal collegial practice understates the problem. Showing an unpublished image to a competitor without the author's knowledge was not normal, and the MRC report was not a public document. Whether it was actionable is a separate question from whether it was proper.

The archive's interest is in a third thing that both versions skip: what it means that this is the single most famous case. Franklin's story is now the standard illustration of a woman's contribution being appropriated, taught in schools and dramatised repeatedly.

A case becomes canonical when it is documented, dramatic and legible. Those properties are not correlated with frequency. The reason everyone knows about Photograph 51 is that Watson wrote a candid and self-incriminating memoir, which is a rare thing for anyone to do.

So the well-known case is the one where the evidence happens to survive in unusual detail, and the ordinary version, in which a contribution is quietly absorbed with no memoir and no photograph, leaves no comparable trace and is therefore not taught.

This is the file drawer again, applied to injustice rather than to results. What gets recorded is what somebody wrote down, and what gets remembered is what makes a story.