... in medicine/physiology for their discoveries of the structure of DNA. Because the Nobel Prize can be awarded only to the living, Wilkins's colleague Dr Rosalind Franklin, who died from cancer at the age of thirty-seven, could not be honoured. This essay discusses whether Franklin should have been honoured to an equal degree, had she been alive. The story of the DNA findings begins in the late nineteenth century, when a German biochemist found that the nucleic acids, long-chain polymers of nucleotides, were made up of sugar, phosphoric acid, and several nitrogen-containing bases. Later it was found that the sugar in nucleic acid could be ribose or deoxyribose, giving two forms: RNA and DNA. In 1943, American Oswald Avery proved that DNA carries genetic information. He even suggested DNA might actually be the gene. Most people at the time thought the gene would be protein, not nucleic acid, but by the late ...

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