The camera was small and made of brass. In the spring of 1952, at King’s College London, Rosalind Franklin and her student Raymond Gosling put a very thin piece of DNA in front of it. Then they sent X-rays into the camera for hours or days. One picture was the best they had. But it was not perfect, because the film inside the camera moved.
This picture was called Photograph 49. On the same day, Franklin started a new picture of the same DNA. The new picture was Photograph 51. Today it is very famous.
For many years, people told one story. They said Franklin did not understand her own picture. A new paper came out on 5 October 2026, and it says the opposite.
The old story came mostly from James Watson. He said that in 1953, Maurice Wilkins showed him one of Franklin’s photographs. Watson said he understood the answer at once. He said the picture showed a helix, a long spiral shape.
Two men wrote the new paper: Alistair Sponsel, from Philadelphia, and Brian Sutton, from King’s College London. They read Franklin’s notes. She wrote little about Photograph 51, but she wrote a lot about Photograph 49. They say she saw the helix in that first picture. That is why she made a second, better one. She made it because she wanted to publish it. Elspeth Garman, another scientist, says Franklin was an “experimental perfectionist.”
Franklin worked slowly. She did not want to guess. She wanted her pictures to give her the answer. By March 1953 she had the right answer. The next day, news of the Watson and Crick model came to King’s.
In April 1953, the journal Nature printed three papers about DNA. Franklin died in 1958. She was 37. In 1962, Crick, Watson and Wilkins won the Nobel Prize. A dead person cannot win this prize.
Later, Robert Crease went to some talks by Watson at Brookhaven National Laboratory. After the first talk, there was time for one question. A woman put up her hand. She asked Watson to say more about Rosalind Franklin’s work on DNA. Some people in the room clapped.