Crucial contributions in the scientific community tend to bring great recognition and success to their discoverers - but the revelation of the DNA helix leads a different story.

Rosalind Franklin was born in 1920, in London, pursuing a scientific education studying physics and chemistry at Cambridge University. During WWII, Franklin gave up a fellowship to work for the British Coal Utilisation Research Association, investigating the physical chemistry of carbon and coal for the war effort. Despite this setback, she used this research for her doctoral thesis, receiving a doctorate from Cambridge in 1945.

In 1951 Franklin joined the Biophysical Laboratory at King’s College as a research fellow. There she employed the use of X-ray diffraction methods to the study of DNA (X-ray diffraction involves beaming X-rays through molecules to create a shadow picture of the molecule's structure). At the time, there was very little knowledge about the chemical makeup or structure of DNA. Franklin’s research soon led her to discover the density of DNA and, most importantly, her work established that the molecule was a helical formation - a fundamental discovery that revolutionized research into DNA.

Franklin suffered from sexism and patronizing attitudes that forced her into doing much of her work and research alone. Unknown to Franklin, her senior partner, Maurice Wilkins, showed some of Franklin's findings to James Watson and Francis Crick in January 1953. One of the pieces of her unpublished data shown included “photo 51,” which was an X-ray diffraction picture of a DNA molecule that clearly demonstrated the helix pattern. James Watson was reported saying: "The instant I saw the picture, my mouth fell open and my pulse began to race."

Franklin’s work allowed Watson and Crick to make critical advancements through the proposal that the DNA molecule was structured of two chains of nucleotides paired together to form a double helix. “Their” discovery explained how the DNA molecule could replicate itself during cell division, allowing organisms to reproduce themselves with incredible genetic accuracy despite occasional mutations. These new findings were revealed in their famous paper in the April 1953 issue of Nature.

For their work, Watson, Crick, and Wilkins were awarded the Nobel Prize in 1962. Despite her essential contribution to the discovery of DNA's helical structure, Rosalind Franklin was not named a prize winner. None gave Franklin credit for her contributions at that time. Most unfortunately, she had died of cancer four years earlier, at the age of 37, possibly caused by her extensive exposure to radiation while doing X-ray crystallography work.

Franklin's work on DNA may have remained unnoticed, but in Watson’s 1968 memoir, The Double Helix, he presented Franklin as “a bad-tempered, arrogant bluestocking who jealously guarded her data from colleagues, even though she was not competent to interpret it.”

Over the past few decades, Franklin's role in the discovery of DNA’s structure has become better known. Several articles and documentaries have tried to exemplify the part she played in "the race for the double helix," cheated by both misogynist colleagues and her early death of a Nobel prize .

Many of the posthumous sources unfairly obscure both a brilliant scientific career and Franklin herself. Her stunning find made the era of "new biology" possible that led to the biotechnology industry and even the human genetic blueprint.

The exploitation of Rosalind Franklin’s work reaffirms the importance of fairness and equality within the scientific community and the detriments of broader stigmas against women in general. While Rosalind Franklin will never win the Nobel Prize she rightfully deserves for her invaluable contributions to medicine and biology, continuing to preserve her story demands for change to create a brighter future with equality in STEM everywhere.