Which search company honored Franklin with a doodle in 2013? The answer is Google.
Google honored Rosalind Franklin with a doodle in 2013, showing her looking toward a DNA double helix, with an X-ray image of Photo 51 behind her. The tribute marked the lasting importance of her scientific work and helped bring her name to a worldwide audience.
Franklin was an expert in X-ray crystallography, a technique that uses diffraction patterns to investigate the arrangement of atoms in crystals and other ordered structures. At King’s College London, her DNA research generated crucial evidence about the molecule’s form, including Photo 51.
The doodle did not mean Franklin discovered DNA alone. James Watson and Francis Crick proposed the double-helix model, while Maurice Wilkins also worked on DNA at King’s. Franklin’s data were central, but the historical story is more complicated than the simplified popular account. She died in 1958 and therefore was not eligible for the 1962 Nobel Prize, which is not awarded posthumously.