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Ironically, Franklin thought of her stint at King's as the low point of her career. By the time the news about DNA broke, she had moved on to a lab at the University of London, where she studied the structure of viruses. There she finally met the Crick to her Watson, the crystallographer Aaron Klug, with whom she did the best work of her career. In 1955 Don Caspar, a young researcher from the California Institute of Technology, visited the lab, and they became close. At 35, Franklin had still never had a fulfilling romantic relationship with a man, and Caspar might well have become her first--but fate intervened. In the summer of 1956, Franklin felt a stabbing pain in her abdomen. It was ovarian cancer, which was well advanced. It was almost certainly the price she paid for having worked so closely with X-ray radiation earlier in her career. She died on April 16, 1958. She was 37.
Franklin's life was short, but its epilogue has been long. Watson, Crick and Maurice Wilkins were awarded the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1962. (Nobels are awarded only to living scientists, and Franklin died too early to share the glory.) In an uncharacteristically heartfelt afterword to The Double Helix, Watson admits that his "initial impressions of her, both scientific and personal...were often wrong." She has been the subject of two biographies, a BBC movie and numerous articles, all aimed at giving her the credit she was denied during her lifetime. In 2000, King's College christened its new life-sciences building the Franklin-Wilkins building. But in life Franklin never felt a need to be defended. Prickly she may have been, even brusque and difficult, but she was never troubled by bitterness over what might have been. Who was Rosalind Franklin? The snippy, standoffish, supporting player? The brilliant, wronged woman? Or somebody else entirely? There are deeper mysteries in life than DNA, and some of them may never be solved. --By Lev Grossman