Matthew Cobb

She had just been brought in to work on it.

And then it gets tricky.

This is where it gets murky.

Because if most people know, or they believe they know, that Jim Watson sees one of Rosalind Franklin's photographs, something called Photograph 51, which has got this kind of X shape, and that gives them the double helix.

Now, the question in all things is, how do you know that?

It's expression in science.

It's epistemology.

How do you know what you know?

Even more so in history.

And the actual source of this is very, very hard to pin down.

Jim Watson in The Double Helix, he says, it's very vague what he says.

He says that he saw, Wilkins showed him some images of the two forms of DNA that there were, the A form and the B form.

And we know that from a letter that he actually wrote in March 1953.

So we've got contemporary evidence.

He did see something that excited him and made him sure that they could crack the problem.

But if it was so obvious...

that Jim Watson, this neophyte, who didn't know much about X-ray crystallography at all, he was a zoologist like me, he knew about birds, you know?

If he could see it instantly, then how come Rosalind Franklin, this very, very clever, trained physical chemist, how come she didn't get it?

So there's a problem in the story, right?

It doesn't quite make sense.