Rosalind Franklin
Her X-ray photograph revealed the shape of DNA, and others took the credit
Rosalind Franklin was born in London in 1920 into a well-off Anglo-Jewish family that expected its daughters to do useful things, though not necessarily to become scientists. She decided on science at 15. Her father worried it was no career for a woman, but she went to Newnham College, Cambridge, and then spent the war years studying the microstructure of coal, work that earned her a PhD and is still cited today.
In Paris after the war she learned X-ray crystallography, the art of firing X-rays through crystals and reading the patterns they scatter. She was happy there. Returning to King's College London in 1951 was a shock: the department was cold to her, and she and Maurice Wilkins fell into a mutual dislike that neither ever resolved.
Working with the student Raymond Gosling, she produced the sharpest images of DNA anyone had made. One of them, Photo 51, was shown to James Watson without her knowledge in early 1953. It confirmed that DNA was a helix and gave him and Francis Crick the measurements they needed. Her own careful analysis was published alongside theirs, as supporting evidence.
She moved to Birkbeck College, where she did pioneering work on the structure of viruses and was, by all accounts, happier. Ovarian cancer killed her in 1958, aged 37. The Nobel Prize for DNA went to Watson, Crick and Wilkins in 1962. Prizes are not given posthumously, and for decades her part in the story was barely mentioned.