Nov. 11, 2025 6:30 AM PT
To the editor: James Watson’s 1962 Nobel Prize, awarded collectively with Francis Crick and Maurice Wilkins, is among the many best-known Nobel honors (“James Watson, Nobel Prize winner and DNA pioneer, dies,” Nov. 7). It must be famous, nevertheless, that it was British chemist Rosalind Franklin who, in May 1952, made Watson’s achievement potential by exhibiting in her well-known {Photograph} 51 that DNA was a double helix, not a triple helix favored by Caltech’s Linus Pauling. Sadly, Franklin couldn’t win a Nobel Prize as a result of she died of ovarian most cancers in 1958, at age 37, and the prize isn’t awarded posthumously.
The outspoken and controversial Watson had described Franklin unflatteringly in his 1968 guide “The Double Helix.” Nonetheless, years later, he agreed that Franklin’s work was indispensable to figuring out the construction of DNA in remarks he made in 2000 on the opening of King’s School’s Franklin-Wilkins constructing in London.
Harold N. Bass, Porter Ranch
