The 31-year-old Franklin did not openly reveal any bitterness over this, according to lore, and is said to have stayed cordial with glory boys Watson and Crick - even as she moved on, physically and intellectually, to study virology and plants at London’s collegial Birkbeck University. Her work appeared in that same edition, but only as supporting material. In her image, they instantly knew what they were seeing, and soon published their groundbreaking DNA discovery in 1953’s Nature journal - according Franklin only a footnote.

She did not get along with her lab’s deputy director, Maurice Wilkins, and - without her knowledge - he showed her Photo 51 to two men who would soon know the white-hot spotlight of scientific glory: American scientist James Watson and British colleague Francis Crick. Since science is also so often about social politics, though, Franklin began to be cut out of history’s picture. As an X-ray crystallographer seven years later at King’s College in London, she took the famed “Photo 51” - a 100-hour exposure - that clearly revealed DNA’s double-helix structure. It was at Cambridge University during World War II that Franklin focused on physical chemistry, studying graphite and carbon microstructures - she dug intellectually deep into coal - before learning X-ray diffraction in Paris. The brilliant and devoted Franklin should perhaps be known today as science’s “duchess of Cambridge.” Instead, she has been perhaps most widely cast as “the dark lady of DNA” - long rendered as some shadowy figure just outside the frame and field of vision.

The woman spotlighted is Rosalind Franklin, the pioneering British molecular biologist who wasn’t in the room in real life when her Photo 51 was shared behind her back - and who wasn’t around in death when three colleagues won science’s biggest honor thanks in part to her crucial work. In the elegant, old-timey Doodle, we see a scientific visionary - even as she sees the very photo that would trigger our sudden understanding of DNA and the swirling, twisted-ladder building blocks of life. The picture at the center of this intrigue is known - with a certain mystery-thriller air - as “Photo 51.” And today, that amazing image gets perhaps its widest single exposure yet: as the ultimate focal point of today’s Google home page.

Rosalind franklin the dark lady of dna