Flutterby™! : Rosalind Frankliln & helixes

Looking even more like that old "What did Watson & Crick discover? Rosalind Franklin's notes." line isn't a joke. Science: Exclusive: How did Rosalind Franklin miss the helix in her iconic DNA image? She didn’t

Watson’s slight took hold partly because Franklin’s lab notes, usually thorough and meticulous, say little about photograph 51. But in a paper published today in the Journal of the History of Biology, Sponsel and Sutton draw attention to the earlier image, photograph 49, showing she made extensive notes about it despite a cosmetic defect. She recognized it suggested a helical structure and used it to calculate, for the first time, the length of each turn in the spiral—34 angstroms—and the number of bases “per turn of helix (if there is a helix).”