Lilith,

The way the game is played in those circles is to publish correctly first. Many people are unaware that Linus Pauling and Robert Corey proposed that DNA was made up of three chains, twisted around each other in ropelike stands. Shortly thereafter, Watson and Crick proposed the double helix structure, which turned out to be correct.

Between 1951 and 1953 Franklin came very close to solving the DNA structure. She was beaten to publication by Crick and Watson in part because of the friction between Maurice Wilkins and herself. At one point, Wilkins showed Watson one of Franklin's crystallographic portraits of DNA. When he saw the picture, the solution became apparent to him, and the results went into an article in Nature almost immediately. Franklin's work did appear as a supporting article in the same issue of the journal.

A debate about the amount of credit due to Franklin continues. What is clear is that she did have a meaningful role in discerning the structure of DNA and that she was a scientist of the first rank

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Eudaimonia