24 April 2003 15:00 GMT

by Henry Nicholls

[CAPTION/CREDIT]

The famous 'photograph 51' of DNA that James Watson claims led him and Francis Crick directly to the discovery of the double helix, was not, after all, taken by Rosalind Franklin as is widely held, but by Raymond Gosling, her PhD student at King's College London.

Photograph 51 has always been attributed to Rosalind Franklin, the talented physical chemist at King's College London, whose research involved taking unique X-ray photographs of DNA. This single image, above all else, has come to signify Franklin's incredible contribution to the discovery, for which, some say, she has never received the recognition she deserved. But it now transpires that the iconic photograph 51 was taken by her postgraduate student, Raymond Gosling.

"I took photograph 51," Gosling told BioMedNet News, a claim supported by Franklin's biographer, Brenda Maddox, in a special report on BioMedNet News & Features. "I think you probably could say that Gosling took it," she agreed.

According to James Watson's dramatized account of the discovery of the double helix, his preview of this particular X-ray image of DNA was a revelation that led the Cambridge duo directly to the structure of the double helix. Watson had been casually shown the photo by Maurice Wilkins, assistant head of Franklin's department. "The instant I saw the picture my mouth fell open and my pulse began to race," wrote Watson in The Double Helix.

Although the ownership of this photograph does not diminish Franklin's crucial role in the DNA story, it does change how Gosling should be viewed, says James Tait, who together with his late wife Sylvia Simpson and Tadeus Reichstein revealed the molecular structure of aldosterone in 1953, a discovery that at the time received much wider publicity than did the double helix discovery.

"I think the real martyr of the story is Gosling and not Franklin," said Tait, who is to publish a book on the events of 1953. "I don't suppose Gosling would ever have got [the Nobel prize], but he was involved in all the work," he said.

Watson's adventitious glimpse of photograph 51 stimulated him to resume model building, but another lead came from a Medical Research Council report on King's College that Cavendish colleague, Max Perutz, leaked to Watson and Crick the following week. This contained details of Franklin and Gosling's unpublished research, from which Crick would work out that DNA was comprised of two helical and anti-parallel strands.

"We all knew that they had access to the MRC report that Rosalind and I wrote earlier, which had the dimensions of the helix, phosphate groups on the outside and number of nucleotides in the unit cell along the fibre axis," said Gosling.

The structure of DNA was revealed to the world in three articles in a single issue of Nature published on 25 April 1953. The first of the trio of articles was the famous letter by Watson and Crick that brought them credit for unraveling the detailed structure of the double helix. The third of the trio was an article by Franklin and Gosling, which included much of the unpublished data, including photograph 51, that the Cambridge team had been privy to in the MRC report.

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Credit: Photograph 51. Raymond Gosling, King's College London