Letters to the Editor: Rosalind Franklin made James Watson’s Nobel-winning discoveries possible
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To the editor: James Watson’s 1962 Nobel Prize, awarded jointly with Francis Crick and Maurice Wilkins, is among the best-known Nobel honors (“James Watson, Nobel Prize winner and DNA pioneer, dies,” Nov. 7). It should be noted, however, that it was British chemist Rosalind Franklin who, in May 1952, made Watson’s achievement possible by showing in her famous Photograph 51 that DNA was a double helix, not a triple helix favored by Caltech’s Linus Pauling. Sadly, Franklin could not win a Nobel Prize because she died of ovarian cancer in 1958, at age 37, and the prize isn’t awarded posthumously.
The outspoken and controversial Watson had described Franklin unflatteringly in his 1968 book “The Double Helix.” However, years later, he agreed that Franklin’s work was indispensable to determining the structure of DNA in remarks he made in 2000 at the opening of King’s College’s Franklin-Wilkins building in London.
Harold N. Bass, Porter Ranch
