Who was Rosalind Franklin's graduate student who produced Photo 51?

Rosalind Franklin's graduate student Raymond Gosling produced Photo 51.

Gosling was a PhD student at King's College London who worked first under Maurice Wilkins and then alongside Franklin after she joined the laboratory in 1951. Their experiments used X-ray diffraction to study DNA fibres and distinguish its structural forms.

In 1952, Gosling made Photo 51, a particularly clear diffraction image of hydrated B-DNA. Its X-shaped pattern provided strong evidence that DNA had a helical structure. The photograph became one of the most famous images in the history of molecular biology.

The wording can obscure an important nuance: Gosling did not work in isolation. Franklin supervised and collaborated with him, and the image emerged from their shared experimental programme. Later, Maurice Wilkins showed the photograph to James Watson, who used it with other evidence while working with Francis Crick on the double-helix model. Gosling's role was long less widely recognized than those of the better-known scientists.