were awarded it. Science and history books could definitely do a better job of telling her story, of course.

"No appeals may be made" - it's in the Nobel Foundation statutes

It might be worth applying public pressure.

A campaign demanding the Nobel Foundation apologize for excluding Ms. Franklin might well succeed, especially after all those post-Nobel interviews where Watson made an arrogant, bigoted ass of himself.

Here is the current version:

n/t.

Some small percentage of which might actually deserve some recognition. Sort of like declaring the runner-up in every election to be deserving of a recount.

At the Univ of Rochester in 1971.

were very upfront about Franklin's contribution to the development of their double helix model and wanted her to share in the prize. However, just like with the work of Darwin, others were on a similar task and understanding was in parallel. Watson and Crick were, to their credit working tirelessly on the DNA model, had several prototypes in the works before seeing photo 51, which was at that point several years old. I'm not entirely sure Franklin knew exactly what photo 51 represented.

To be clear I consider Franklin to be an exceptional but complex individual and if she had lived I believe she would have contributed much to science. Those who study biology even at an undergraduate level know about her. She was a genius but like many high IQ individuals they sometimes have difficulties relating on a personal level. In my opinion as much as I would have loved to have the opportunity to meet her I'm of the opinion that she was a difficult person to work with. However I do think it would be very interesting to know how the study of genetics and cell respiration would have progressed if she had lived longer.

"Working with a student, Raymond Gosling, Franklin was able to get two sets of high-resolution photos of crystallized DNA fibers. She used two different fibers of DNA, one more highly hydrated than the other. From this she deduced the basic dimensions of DNA strands, and that the phosphates were on the outside of what was probably a helical structure.

She presented her data at a lecture in King's College at which James Watson was in attendance. In his book The Double Helix, Watson admitted to not paying attention at Franklin's talk and not being able to fully describe the lecture and the results to Francis Crick. Watson and Crick were at the Cavendish Laboratory and had been working on solving the DNA structure. Franklin did not know Watson and Crick as well as Wilkins did and never truly collaborated with them. It was Wilkins who showed Watson and Crick the X-ray data Franklin obtained. The data confirmed the 3-D structure that Watson and Crick had theorized for DNA. In 1953, both Wilkins and Franklin published papers on their X-ray data in the same Nature issue with Watson and Crick's paper on the structure of DNA."

Franklin has become a darling of feminist revisionists, but she didn't really do all that much, and misinterpreted some of her own results. Remember, there were lots of other people interested in the same thing at the time, including Linus Pauling, who could easily claim a share of the credit. Scuttlebutt among certain scientific literati for years has been that Peter Pauling, on a visit to Crick's lab, tipped them off to work Pauling was doing which enabled them to get the structure first. Actual historical documents don't support that; Pauling's idea was "inside-out" relative to the actual structure, a notion which Crick dismissed as laughable, for good reasons. The idea that DNA was a helix was suspected by many, based on comparison of X-ray diffraction patterns, to those of other notable helical polymers, including silk and the ?-helical proteins (Pauling again; at the time he seemed the most likely candidate to solve the structure of DNA). The challenge was largely one of getting adequately informative X-ray data, as DNA was experimentally difficult to work with in this regard. Franklin contributed some crucial observations re. the changes of DNA diffraction patterns with changes in atmospheric humidity (not a single "picture" as simple-mindedly described in the OP), but only Crick and Watson put all the pieces together (figuratively and literally). Franklin's major complaint was that she didn't get acknowledgement for the particular data she collected, which as an X-ray specialist, was her principal role.

All these attempts to portray Rosalind Franklin as an oppressed heroine may be based on the actual social environment of the time, but they do an injustice to almost all involved. Watson, the more outgoing, photogenic member of the pair is most remembered by the public, but Crick was the senior investigator who contributed a very great deal more to molecular biology than just the structure of DNA. It was Crick who formulated the Central Dogma of Molecular Biology, and contributed to uncovering many of the mechanistic details of DNA/RNA transcription. Even an incomplete listing of his contributions is adequate to reveal how great his impact on the field was. The same cannot be said even for his colleague Watson, much less for Franklin.

It does not benefit this woman's reputation to romanticize her story into something that it wasn't, however sympathetically the story reads.

That is because she died of ovarian cancer in 1958 and Nobel Prizes are never given posthumously.

The history books should account for her contribution to Crick's and Watson's work, especially Photo 51

There’s a lot of agitation these days to give Franklin more credit than she deserves.

I always devoted a day's lecture about her.