In 1951, Franklin began working as a research associate at King’s College London. Utilizing her mastery of X-ray diffraction, she and her graduate student Raymond Gosling captured Photo 51 in May 1952. This exceptionally clear image of a single fiber of DNA provided the unmistakable geometric clues required to identify the molecule’s helical nature.
Her colleague Maurice Wilkins showed Photo 51 to James Watson without her knowledge or consent. Watson and Francis Crick utilized her unpublished data to assemble their famous double-helix model, which they published in April 1953.
