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.

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.)