This is from Wiki, explaining that Franklin actually would not cooperate with the other scientists on the DNA Project. She took Maurice Wilkins lab equipment (which he had funded for her), and took it on as her project. Wilkins had arranged a fellowship to king's college and wanted to collaborate with her on the DNA project. She was not cooperative, and was led by her own work in a different direction than what the prize winning scientists took. She had the evidence -- she did not understand it. Read on if you like science. . . Image Wikipedia: Text in italics from Wikipedia. No work had been done on DNA in the laboratory for several months; the new X-ray tube (that wilkins acquired for Rosalind) sat unused, waiting for Rosalind Franklin. Franklin ended up with the DNA from Signer, Gosling became her PhD student and she had the expectation that DNA X-ray diffraction work was her project. Wilkins returned to the laboratory expecting that Franklin would be his collaborator and that they would work together on the DNA project that he had started. Franklin felt that DNA was now her project and would not collaborate with Wilkins, who then pursued parallel studies. By November 1951 Wilkins thought he had evidence that DNA in cells as well as purified DNA had a helical structure. Alex Stokes had solved the basic mathematics of helical diffraction theory and thought that Wilkin's X-ray diffraction data indicated a helical structure in DNA. Wilkins met with Watson and Crick and told them about his results. This information from Wilkins along with additional information gained by Watson when he heard Franklin talk about her research during a King's College research meeting, stimulated Watson and Crick to create their first molecular model of DNA, a model with the phosphate backbones at the center. Upon viewing the model of the proposed structure, Franklin told Watson and Crick that "it was wrong." Franklin knew that because of basic chemical principles the hydrophilic backbones should go on the outside of the molecule where they could interact with water. Crick tried to get Wilkins to continue with additional molecular modeling efforts, but Wilkins did not take this approach. Kings probably was a sexist organization but that was typical of the times. Yeah women could vote here, but they were homebodies, and expected to be homebodies raising the kids. I'm old enough to remember when girls finally did not have to take Home Economics to get out of high school. There was a conscious decision in the US to make "economic units" out of both men and women. I favored it, but it went through feminism, bra burning, and a lot of things to get where we are. Women have their own credit cards! I was always in favor of this. Anyway. During 1952, Franklin also refused to participate in molecular modeling efforts and continued to work on step-by-step detailed analysis of her X-ray diffraction data (Patterson synthesis). By Spring of 1952, Franklin had received permission from Randall to request permission to transfer her fellowship so that she could leave King's College and work in John Bernal's laboratory. However, Franklin remained at King's College for another year. By early 1953, it was clear that Franklin would simply drop her DNA work at the end of her fellowship that summer, or even sooner due to illness. Linus Pauling had published a proposed but incorrect structure of DNA, making the same basic error that had been made by Watson and Crick a year earlier. Some of those working on DNA in the United Kingdom, feared that Pauling would quickly solve the DNA structure once he recognized his error and put the backbones of the nucleotide chains on the outside of a model of DNA. After March 1952 Franklin concentrated on the X-ray data for the A-form of less hydrated DNA while Wilkins tried to work on the B-form. Wilkins was handicapped because Franklin had all of the good DNA. Wilkins got new DNA, but it was not as good as the original sample he had used in 1950 and which Franklin continued to use. About his only new results were for biological samples like sperm cells, which seemed to also suggest a helical structure for DNA. In the middle of 1952 Wilkins had for a time abandoned further DNA work when Franklin reported to him that her results made her doubt the helical nature of the A-form. Wilkins feared, the data suggesting a helical structure might just be an artifact. In early 1953 Watson visited King's College and Wilkins showed him a high quality image of the B-form X-ray diffraction pattern that had been produced by Franklin in March 1952. This image was Photo 51. Also see this photo: It is not free use. But you can see it in the link. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Photo_51.jpg With the knowledge that Pauling was working on DNA and had submitted a model of DNA for publication, Watson and Francis Crick mounted one more concentrated effort to deduce the structure of DNA. Crick gained access to a progress reports from King's College that included useful information from Franklin about the features of DNA she had deduced from her X-ray diffraction data from Max Perutz, his thesis supervisor. Watson and Crick published their proposed DNA double helical structure in a paper in the journal Nature in April of 1953. In this paper Watson and Crick acknowledged that they had been "stimulated by.... the unpublished results and ideas" of Wilkins and Franklin. p In recognition of the contribution from King's College, Watson and Crick agreed that Wilkins, Stokes and Wilson[4] and Franklin and Gosling should each publish their x-ray diffraction work, which supported the proposed Crick-Watson model, in separate articles in the same issue of Nature. Wilkins and others went on to repeat and extend much of Franklin's work, and produced much evidence to support the helical model of Crick and Watson. She died in 1958 of bronchopneumonia, secondary carcinomatosis, and cancer of the ovary. She was 37. It is nice to "like" science. Few peopled understand the way science is done, and how it is validated. The work on intelligence testing can be seen in my blog about extremely dangerous non-genetic viral. . http://www.xomba.com/extremely_dangerous_non_genetic_viral_brain_infection_discovered_at_cold_springs_harbor_laboratory_has_spread_to_uk Watson did not discredit science, in the least. But he made a personal personnel statement which will haunt him. You want to do something? Understand whatever is being measured and refute it with test data.