Comment by dekhn

Rosalind Franklin didn't figure out how to crystalize the DNA, they were doing fiber diffraction. Similarly, the films were collected by her student Raymond Gosling. She shared her work at a department seminar and published it internally (Crick didn't "steal" it). And she was also published in the same exact journal of Nature.

The reason W&C won the prize is that not only did the propose the (close to correct) structure, they realized it was a antiparallel double helix, and deduced the underlying mechanism for genetic replication: "It has not escaped our notice that the specific pairing we have postulated immediately suggests a possible copying mechanism for the genetic material." and also made a few key observations about isomerization in bases that allows for G/C and A/T pairing to be specific.

Crick was a genius, although he also went off-piste with panspermia, and Watson is just an asshole. Franklin was a great scientist but it's not clear at all that she should have or would have received the prize.