Historical story · an object
Photograph 51
Image · 1952 · King’s College London
51
An image. Then who saw it, and with what permission.
Photograph 51 was taken by Rosalind Franklin and Raymond Gosling in 1952. Maurice Wilkins showed it to James Watson. The 1953 Nature papers include Franklin and Gosling’s own. Franklin was not a footnote. She was not in Stockholm. She was dead before the Prize.
Sourced
Use the 1953 papers first. Use Watson’s 1968 book as a memoir with a stake. Do not let the memoir become the archive.
Concordance
- The thing
- An X-ray diffraction photograph of DNA, taken by Franklin and Gosling, later shown to Watson.
- Seen
- A cross of intensities. A helical reading. A race.
- Sourced
- Franklin and Gosling, Nature 171 (1953). Watson, The Double Helix, as a later, interested memoir.
- Miss
- Watson’s memoir is not Franklin’s. She died in 1958.
- One question remains
- What did the image show, and what did the showing cost?
