Comment by aeternum
12 hours ago
Helical proteins are quite ubiquitous in biology, that part of the discovery seems inconsequential.
Seems to me that #3 is the whole story. That was the key insight, the thing that was never known before. The secret to how life replicates.
Other comments suggest that Franklin would have eventually gotten there on her own. Her work was key to the discovery as we know it, which wouldn't have happened without it. To me, that's the whole story.
Specifically the antiparallel base matching was the important bit, agreed, but minor nitpick. The first alpha helix wasn't solved until 1951, so one year earlier. Their ubiquity was very novel.