Rosalind Franklin felt science was her future from the age of just 15, and despite her father being against the idea of women attending University, she graduated and completed her doctorate in physical chemistry at Cambridge. Doctorate in hand, she started work in a laboratory in Paris, where she met Maurice Wilkins. They both started work on DNA projects separately, but Wilkins mistook her for a lab assistant instead of a lead on her project and this unsurprisingly caused friction. It is said that James deliberately belittled her, for instance in his book The Double Helix, he refers to her as Rosy - a nickname she is known to dislike. Maurice Wilkins showed Rosalinds x-ray photographs of DNA to James Watson, and this acted as a catalyst for the structure to become apparent to him. He then published in the journal Nature, without Franklin as an author. In 1962, a Nobel Prize was awarded to James Watson, Francis Crick and Maurice Wilkins for their double helix model of DNA structure. By this point, Rosalind had died from ovarian cancer, at the age of just 37, and the three omitted her from their acceptance speech. The debate goes on about who deserves what credit, but its at least clear that Franklin had a part to play that went un-credited for too long. She went on to work on the tobacco mosaic virus and the polio virus before she passed away in 1958.
