Rosalind Franklin and DNA best evidence for the structure of DNA. For the discovery of the correct chemical structure of DNA, the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 1962 was shared by her colleagues and close researchers James Watson, Francis Crick and Maurice Wilkins; she died four years earlier in 1958 making her inelligible for the award. Rosalind Franklin joined the King's College London in January 1951 to work on the crystallography of DNA. By the end of that year, she established two important facts: one is that phosphate groups, which are the molecular backbone for the nucleotide chains, lie on the outside (it
Molecular Structure of Nucleic Acids: A Structure for Deoxyribose Nucleic Acid head William Lawrence Bragg, to publish their double-helix molecular model of DNA based on data from Franklin and Wilkins. By November 1951, Watson had acquired little training in X-ray crystallography, by his own admission, and thus had not fully understood what Franklin was saying about the structural symmetry of the DNA molecule. Crick, however, knowing the Fourier transforms of Bessel functions that represent the X-ray diffraction patterns of helical structures of atoms, correctly interpreted further one of Franklin's experimental findings as indicating that DNA was most likely to be a double helix with the two polynucleotide chains running in opposite