Historic DNA image by ‘forgotten’ pioneer Rosalind Franklin goes on public view

Digital exhibits at the Wellcome Library include work by Rosalind Franklin, the Notting Hill-born chemist and X-ray crystallographer whose images of DNA were key to revealing the famous double helix
West End role: Nicole Kidman as Rosalind Franklin in Photograph 51
Mark Blunden @_MarkBlunden23 September 2015

More than a million pages of research that led to the discovery of the secret of life have been digitised into one of Britain’s biggest public medical archives.

Digital exhibits at the Wellcome Library include work by Rosalind Franklin, the Notting Hill-born chemist and X-ray crystallographer whose images of DNA were key to revealing the famous double helix. Her dramatised story, featuring rivalries and sexism in academia, is the subject of West End play Photograph 51, starring Nicole Kidman.

Its title refers to the 1952 X-ray diffraction image of a strand of DNA taken by Dr Franklin’s PhD student, Raymond Gosling, at King’s College London. Known as Photo 51, it led to the discovery of the double helix and won Francis Crick, James Watson and Maurice Wilkins the Nobel Prize.

They were awarded it in 1962, four years after she died, aged 37, of double ovarian cancer, possibly triggered by her own X-ray equipment. The rules of the Nobel Prize state it cannot be awarded posthumously or shared between more than three people.

The hard copy of Photo 51 is held in the Kings College London Archives, but it can now be seen in the Wellcome Collection’s online resource Codebreakers: Makers of Modern Genetics.

It is among more than a million images scanned in using Preservica digital preservation software. Notes, letters, sketches, essays and photos by Crick, Watson, Wilkins and Franklin reveal the “personal and professional lives of extraordinary minds behind one of the 20th century’s biggest discoveries”.

Simon Chaplin, the Wellcome Trust’s director of culture and society, added: “Our collections offer an extraordinarily rich resource documenting one of the most significant periods of scientific innovation in history.”

The Wellcome Library’s digital archive is projected to hold more than 25 million images by next year.

Photograph 51 is on at the Noel Coward theatre until November 21.

BBC Radio 3 will be at the Wellcome Collection in Euston Road for three days of free events to “explore the role of music in human life”. They begin on Friday.

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