Who drew the diagram for Watson and Crick's 1953 DNA paper?

Odile Crick drew the diagram for Watson and Crick’s 1953 DNA paper.

Odile Crick was an artist and the wife of Francis Crick. Watson and Francis Crick asked her to prepare the elegant illustration of the proposed DNA double helix for their landmark paper, “A Structure for Deoxyribose Nucleic Acid,” published in Nature on 25 April 1953. The drawing became one of the most recognizable scientific illustrations of the twentieth century.

The diagram was not the discovery itself and did not replace the experimental evidence. Watson and Crick assembled their model using chemical reasoning, Chargaff’s base-composition findings, and X-ray diffraction results from researchers at King’s College London, especially Rosalind Franklin and Maurice Wilkins. Odile translated the structure into a clear visual form suitable for publication.

A common mix-up is to credit Rosalind Franklin with the published drawing because her X-ray work was crucial to the model. Franklin contributed indispensable experimental evidence, including data related to the B-form of DNA, but Odile Crick made the paper’s illustration. The paper appeared alongside related reports by Wilkins and by Franklin and Raymond Gosling.