Understanding DNA: Five key scientists who unravelled the helix

(1898-1961)

Astbury was a British molecular biologist and physicist who spent much of his working life in Leeds.

His work focused originally on the structure of proteins in textiles but, along with his PhD student Florence Bell, he took the first X-ray photographs of DNA in 1937.

Read more about the discovery of DNA:

• How we unravelled the structure of DNA
• Photo 51: the key discovery behind the structure of DNA
• DNA: a timeline of discoveries
• Who really discovered DNA?

(1920-1958)

Franklin (pictured above) was born in London to a rich Jewish family.

The X-ray crystallographer and biophysicist provided much of the experimental evidence for the structure of DNA, in the form of Photo 51 (below), before switching her focus to viruses at Birkbeck College. She died of cancer at the age of 38.

(1916-2004)

Wilkins was a British physicist and molecular biologist who was born in New Zealand. As well as his DNA research, he worked in fields such as radar and microscopy. He remained at King’s College until his retirement in 1981.

(1916-2004)

Crick was born near Northampton to the owner of a shoe factory and became a British biophysicist and molecular biologist. After co-discovering the structure of DNA, he went on to determine how DNA codes for proteins, before venturing into neuroscience.

(1928- )

Watson is an American geneticist and molecular biologist born in Chicago, who gained co-discovering DNA’s structure in Cambridge in 1953, he worked at Harvard University and then the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory until he retired in 2007.