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
Rosalind Franklin and DNA was a general consensus at the time that they were at the inside); and the other is that DNA exists in two forms, a crystalline (dry form) A-DNA and a hydrated (wet form) B-DNA. With her PhD student Raymond Gosling, she produced a series of X-ray images of DNA. The photograph (number 51, hence, popularised as Photo 51) of B-DNA taken in May 1952 was especially crucial. X-ray crystallography did not immediately show the precise helical structure. Franklin chose to work on A-DNA, while B-DNA was given to Maurice Wilkins. By the early 1953, Franklin was aware that both A