Who Won the Nobel Peace Prize for Discovering DNA?

Three men won the Nobel Peace Prize in Physiology for the discovery of DNA, even though a woman, Rosalind Franklin, was instrumental in the discovery. James Watson, Francis Crick, and Maurice Wilkins won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1962.

DNA, or deoxyribo nucleic acid, was originally discovered in April of 1953.  While there is a great deal of technical scientific background that goes into describing this discovery, here is a brief overview:

• Watson and Crick were working on the DNA puzzle at Cambridge in the early 1950's.
• Wilkins and Rosalind Franklin were also studying DNA at King's College.
• In 1951, Watson heard Franklin's lecture on the research that they were doing. They attempted to make a DNA model based on what Watson had learned, but this experiment failed and they were actually told by the head of their department to stop working on DNA.
• Meanwhile, Franklin was busy performing experiments and developing the concept of the "helix" in DNA.
• Franklin's frustrated colleague, Wilkins, shared some of Franklins' work with Watson, allegedly without Franklin's consent.
• Watson and Crick then developed the concept of the double helix, based in part on the information they had obtained from Franklin's work.
• Watson and Crick presented their information about the double structured helix in a 1953 scientific paper.

For more details about the progression of the experiments that led to the DNA, and the contributions of some other scientists who helped along the way, you can visit PBS.org: A Science Odyssey.

Rosalind Franklin

While the information on DNA was presented in 1953, the scientists were not awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for their discovery until nearly ten years later, in 1962.

Rosalind Franklin's name was left off the award because she had passed away by the time the award was given. One of the requirements of the Nobel Peace Prize is that recipients must be alive to receive it.

Early Data Leading to the Discovery of DNA

It is important to note that although Franklin, Crick, Watson and Wilkins are often credited with being the ones who officially discovered DNA, there were discoveries long before by many scientists that led to this breakthrough.

• Nucleic acid, the NA in both DNA and RNA, was discovered way back in 1868 by a scientist named Friedrich Miescher. He discovered nucleic acid, which he called nuclein, when he found a substance no one had ever before seen in the nuclei of cells.
• Two years prior to this Swiss scientist’s discovery, the scientist Gregor Mendel had performed an experiment with peas. His observations during these experiments was closely connected to Miescher’s observations when he discovered what he called nuclein.
• Mendel was able to prove from these experiments that the peas inherited their traits from different packages and that these packages are what we call genes today in modern science.
• It was not until 1944 that a scientist by the name of Oswald Avery made the connection between genes and nucleic acid through experimentation with a strain of bacteria.
• In late 1940’s, after this connection was made, scientists made the connection that DNA was the molecule of life. However, they were still unaware about what the complex molecule looked like.
• In order to unravel the structure of DNA, it was necessary to get some picture of the molecule itself. In order to do this, a combined effort was needed to gain a complete picture of DNA.
• It was not until scientists used x-ray technology that they were to finally able to see the structure of a DNA molecule.

Today the structure is defined as being a double helix. Rosalind Franklin was the first to take the most accurate picture, which became known as photograph 51, that truly defined the structure of the double helix shape of DNA. This picture was taken in 1953 and was the key information given to Watson and Crick for further additional study in order to further define the molecule of DNA.