Scientific Career
Franklin produced the famous Photo 51, an X-ray diffraction image of DNA that was critical evidence for the helical structure. Her meticulous experimental work at King's College London provided key data used by Watson and Crick in their model of DNA.
Contributions Beyond DNA
After leaving King's College, Franklin did pioneering work at Birkbeck College on the structure of tobacco mosaic virus and polio virus, publishing 17 papers in five years on virus structure.
Recognition
Though not awarded the Nobel Prize (she died before the 1962 award to Watson, Crick, and Wilkins), Franklin is now widely recognized as making essential contributions to one of the most important discoveries in biology.