Watson and Crick were widely believed to have hit on the structure of DNA after stealing data from Rosalind Franklin – but newly-discovered documents suggest a different account of this discovery:
As for the B form, she and everyone else at King’s recognized that it was some kind of helix. But to Franklin it was a distraction. At high humidity, water molecules crowded the atoms in DNA, producing a structure she described as “swollen”, “distended”, disordered. “Anyway,” she wrote in the notes for her 1951 seminar, under increased humidity, “the stuff ultimately dissolves, i.e. chains are separated from one another by water”.
But Watson’s narrative contains an absurd presumption. It implies that Franklin, the skilled chemist, could not understand her own data, whereas he, a crystallographic novice, apprehended it immediately. Moreover, everyone, even Watson, knew it was impossible to deduce any precise structure from a single photograph — other structures could have produced the same diffraction pattern.
Notes by Crick for a lecture on the history of the double helix, given to historians of science at the University of Oxford in May 1961, together with formal and informal remarks made throughout his life, reveal that, unlike Photograph 51, this report was truly significant for confirming the structure that Watson and Crick eventually obtained.
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