In the early 1950s, James Watson and Francis Crick were the researchers at the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge. Their first attempt at a model was a catastrophe. It looked like a three-legged stool gone wrong. So, they invited Rosalind Franklin, a brilliant and meticulous chemist from King’s College, to take a look. She took one glance at their work and found several mistakes from the chemistry to the math. As a result, they were banned from working on DNA for a year.
Meanwhile, Franklin was doing the hard labor. She spent 100 hours exposing a tiny fiber of DNA to a narrow beam of X-rays. The result was Photo 51. It didn’t look like much to the untrained eye just a fuzzy “X” shape. But to someone who knew math, that “X” screams one thing: A Helix.
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