Rosalind Franklin is the woman who did the majority of the work in discovering the structure of DNA (double helix), but the credit generally goes to James Watson and Francis Crick. The story is complicated and full of details about the specific temperaments and social skills of the scientists involved, but, in a nutshell:
Franklin was a cautious scientist who refused to begin building a representative model until she could definitively prove that it was correct. She was also not well liked by her colleagues (Wikipedia says due to her "habit of intensely looking people in the eye while being concise, impatient and directly confrontational to the point of abrasiveness"), and this friction lead one researcher to, after witnessing an argument between her and James Watson after Watson had accused her of not being able to interpret her own data, take Watson aside and show him her research. Various Wikipedia articles disagree as to whether this was with or without Franklin's permission.
Her data is considered to be critical to the identification of the structure of DNA. Crick and Watson published their famous double helix model two months later, simply citing "having been stimulated by a general knowledge of" Franklin's… 'unpublished' contribution."
Franklin probably would have also recieved the Nobel Prize for the discovery of the structure of DNA, had she not died of cancer before it was awarded. It was given in 1962 to Crick, Watson, and Maurice Wilkins, the man who revealed her research to Watson ten years earlier.
See also: The Hark! A Vagrant take on it.
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