This new evidence suggests Franklin did not fail to understand the structure of DNA. On visiting the Churchill College archives in Cambridge, the authors found a hitherto unstudied draft news article - written by journalist Joan Bruce in consultation with Franklin and meant for publication in Time magazine - and later found an overlooked letter from one of Franklin’s colleagues to Crick in the Crick archive at the University of California, San Diego. Reconstruction of the double helix model of DNA using some of the original metal plates in Medicine: The Wellcome Galleries at the Science Museum. The resulting metal model of DNA that he and Crick put together after experimenting with cardboard cut-outs, and which was used in a famous Time magazine picture, can be seen in Medicine: The Wellcome Galleries in the museum. In this traditional version of events, Franklin is portrayed as brilliant but ultimately unable to decipher exactly what her own data were telling her about DNA, when Watson supposedly understood the significance of Photograph 51 at first glance. When it was ‘stolen’ by Watson and Crick, ‘it became the emblem of both Franklin’s achievement and her mistreatment,’ they explain. Known as Photograph 51, this image is treated as ‘the philosopher’s stone of molecular biology’, write Cobb and Comfort. It is also more than half a century since Watson wrote The Double Helix, his notoriously candid and raffish first-hand account of what he called ‘perhaps the most famous event in biology since Darwin’s book’.īy popular accounts, the ‘eureka moment’ in the discovery of the double helix came when Watson was shown an X-ray image of DNA taken by Franklin’s student, Raymond Gosling, without her permission or knowledge. However, today in the journal Nature, new evidence is published that shows Rosalind Franklin was truly an equal contributor in the discovery of DNA’s structure and, moreover, Watson and Crick were not as caddish as they are often portrayed, in a commentary by Matthew Cobb of the University of Manchester and Nathaniel Comfort of Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore. The find revealed the molecular details of how traits are passed down generations and the seminal paper on this milestone in molecular biology by James Watson and Francis Crick in Cambridge was published in the journal Nature 70 years ago this week. The 1953 discovery of the double helix molecular structure of DNA, the long chain-like molecule deoxyribonucleic acid, is a key moment in modern history.ĭNA, the molecule in our cells that carries information in the form of genes, was revealed to be a twisting pair of strands that has been unravelling to replicate itself since the dawn of life some four billion years ago. A previously overlooked letter, article and exhibit suggest the British chemist Rosalind Franklin contributed more to revealing the ‘secret of life’ than thought, reports Science Director Roger Highfield.
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