10/07/2026
Exclusive: “The instant I saw the picture my mouth fell open and my pulse began to race.” So wrote James Watson in The Double Helix: A Personal Account of the Discovery of the Structure of DNA, his controversial account of how he and Francis Crick deciphered the structure of DNA in 1953.
The image, now known as photograph 51, showed an elegant, symmetrical pattern of spots formed by x-rays diffracted from strands of DNA—the fingerprint of the molecule’s helical structure.
Rosalind Franklin, an x-ray crystallographer, had produced the image in the spring of 1952. But Watson’s 1968 book, amid other slights and sexist language directed at Franklin, implied the flash of insight was his alone.
Popular accounts still routinely suggest Franklin missed the significance of the photo. She never had a chance to challenge Watson’s dismissive narrative; she died of cancer in 1958, a decade before his memoir was released and became a bestseller.
But a new analysis of her notes on another x-ray image, which she made just days earlier using the same DNA sample, offers a firm rebuttal.
Learn more: https://scim.ag/4rW2T6I
