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 directions. Crick was thus in a unique position to make this interpretation because he had formerly worked on the X-ray diffraction data for other large molecules that had helical symmetry similar to that of DNA. Franklin, on the other hand, rejected the first molecular model building approach proposed by Crick and Watson: the first DNA model, which in 1952 Watson presented to her and to Wilkins in London, had an obviously incorrect structure with hydrated charged groups on the inside of the model, rather than on the outside. Watson explicitly admitted this in his book "The Double Helix". Molecular Structure