Comment by amiga386

Attribution and glory-sharing is a tricky thing. The discovery was piecemeal and has a lot of names attached. For a lot of reasons, some her own, some the sexist institution she was part of, she did not publish first. Watson and Crick did. Even though they were privy to what she knew, and had seen Photo 51, and only briefly reference Wilkins/Franklin from KCL that gave them key insights... they published first.

I believe Franklin would have shared the Nobel prize with Watson and Crick had she not died before she could be nominated. The Nobel committee just don't offer posthumous prizes. That compounds the problem of Watson and KCL minimising her contribution. But if she had survived, I'm confident there would've been a huge dust-up as to whether she or Wilkins got third spot on the Nobel prize. As she was already dead before the DNA structure was confirmed, history couldn't go that way.

It's misattribution of causality. She wasn't nominated because she was dead and she suffered academic sexism, chauvinism and skullduggery, especially from Watson. It's not that she wasn't nominated because of academic sexism, chauvinism and skullduggery.