Controversy
While working at Howard University as an educator, Branson was still hands on in the field. In 1948, Branson was a working with Caltech chemist Linus Pauling on finding possible helical structures within proteins. The two worked on this for months until discovering the alpha and gamma structures in proteins. Branson went back to Howard and was notified by mail of Pauling’s research after he left. Pauling was awarded the Nobel Prize for Chemistry and Branson was completely uncredited for his work.