Comment by skew-aberration

The fact is that after taking that image, she spent some 8+ months on a completely different research direction that yielded no results (A-DNA). She was not the first to take a picture showing helical structure (Wilkins' lab hired her after they had done this, and Pauling inferred helix from even earlier cruder images). She was the last person in the group to be convinced that A-DNA was also helical, and that it was time to start building molecular models. She is on the record mocking Wilkins for his non-specialist confidence in the simple helical structure, during the period she had Photo 51. She was yet to even attempt to model how base pairs (complimentary or otherwise) would fit together in the anti-parallel double helix phosphates-outside model she had by the time they published.

While it's fair to say that she contributed more (EDIT: Crick actually developed a lot of the mathematical theory which Franklin herself used so I'm not decided) than Watson/Crick (phosphates on the outside, precise helix and double helix measurements), and that her contributions were minimized at the time, she did not solve the DNA structure herself, and she certainly didn't do it alone. There are many others who made large contributions to this project and whose names are totally unknown to the average person. She was acknowledged by Watson/Crick and her work was published in the same issue of Nature - nobody could be unaware of her contributions. Watson later tried to rewrite history with himself at the center and was widely panned, even at the time.