Photo 51 didn't hand Watson and Crick the double helix

James Watson and Francis Crick worked out the double-helix structure of DNA on 28 February 1953 at Cambridge’s Cavendish Laboratory and announced it in Nature on 25 April 1953 — but the popular story of a lone eureka and a stolen photograph leaves out much of what happened.

Three myths, checked

• The pub boast. The claim that Crick told drinkers at the Eagle they had “discovered the secret of life” comes from Watson’s later recollection. Nor was it all done in a morning: the pair finished building their model on 7 March 1953.
• Photo 51 handed them the answer. Historians Matthew Cobb and Nathaniel Comfort, writing in Nature in 2023 after going through Rosalind Franklin’s notes, argue that neither her famous X-ray image nor a December 1952 Medical Research Council report containing her data delivered the structure. What did was six weeks of calculations and cardboard models; the report, passed on by Crick’s supervisor Max Perutz, served as a check.
• Franklin was denied a Nobel. She died in 1958, and the prize is not awarded posthumously. When the Nobel archives opened in 2008, they showed no one had ever nominated her.

Cobb and Comfort conclude that Franklin was “an equal contributor”, one of four scientists, with Maurice Wilkins, attacking the problem. An unpublished 1953 draft for Time that they found described “two teams” — Wilkins and Franklin gathering X-ray evidence, Watson and Crick on theory — confirming each other’s work. Nature published three DNA papers together, and the authors of all three signed one of the first public displays of the model in June 1953.

Watson and Crick’s own paper was a brief communication that ended by noting their base pairing “immediately suggests a possible copying mechanism for the genetic material.” In a fuller 1954 paper they conceded that without Franklin’s data their structure would have been “most unlikely, if not impossible”.

The 1962 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine went to Watson, Crick and Wilkins.