The New Zealand-born Wilkins was a retiring figure, almost to the point of invisibility. A 1998 PBS documentary on the discovery of the structure of DNA — a feat for which he shared the 1962 Nobel Prize with Crick and Watson — managed to overlook him entirely.
威尔金斯生于新西兰，是一位离群索居的人，几乎到了从不露面的程度。1962年，他因破译DNA结构而与克里克和沃森共同获得了诺贝尔奖。可是，1998年美国公共广播公司（PBS）一个有关DNA结构破译的记录片中对他的功劳只字不提。

The most enigmatic character of all was Franklin. In a severely unflattering portrait, Watson in The Double Helix depicted Franklin as a woman who was unreasonable, secretive, chronically uncooperative, and — this seemed especially to irritate him — almost willfully unsexy. He allowed that she "was not unattractive and might have been quite stunning had she taken even a mild interest in clothes," but in this she disappointed all expectations. She didn't even use lipstick, he noted in wonder, while her dress sense "showed all the imagination of English blue-stocking adolescents."(In 1968, Harvard University Press canceled publication of The Double Helix after Crick and Wilkins complained about its characterizations, which the science historian Lisa Jardine has described as "gratuitously hurtful." The descriptions quoted above are after Watson softened his comments.)
在这几个人当中，富兰克林是最富神秘色彩的一位。在沃森的《双螺旋》一书中，他用近乎苛刻的言辞将富兰克林描绘成一个不可理喻，守口如瓶，不善于合作，故意不想有女人味——这点似乎尤其令他难受——的女人。他认为她“不是没有魅力，要是在衣着方面稍微花点心思的话，她其实是蛮漂亮的”。但是富兰克林在这方面令所有人失望了，她甚至不用口红，对此，沃森表示大惑不解。而她的衣着“完全是一副英国青年女才子的派头”。（注：1968年，哈佛大学出版社终止了《双螺旋》一书的出版，原因是克里克和威尔金斯抱怨它对人物的描述过于锋芒毕露。对于这一点，科学史家莉萨·贾丁将其描述为“无故地伤害感情”。上述描述是沃森将其语调软化后的引语。）
However, she did have the best images in existence of the possible structure of DNA, achieved by means of X-ray crystallography, the technique perfected by Linus Pauling. Crystallography had been used successfully to map atoms in crystals (hence "crystallography"), but DNA molecules were a much more finicky proposition. Only Franklin was managing to get good results from the process, but to Wilkins's perennial exasperation she refused to share her findings.
然而，在破译DNA结构的研究方面，富兰克林却通过X射线晶体衍射获得了最好的图像。这项技术是由刘易斯·鲍林完善的，曾成功地运用于晶体原子图的研究（它因此而得名为“晶体学”），但DNA分子是更加难以捉摸的对象。是富兰克林从这个过程中取得了好的成果，而令沃森愤愤不已的是，她拒绝与别人一起分享她的研究成果。