In 1945, June Lindsey joined W. H. Taylor’s x-ray crystallography team at the Cavendish Laboratory, home to the biggest names in crystallography and state-of-the-art equipment. Her graduate work included growing crystals of adenine hydrochloride hemihydrate and guanine hydrochloride monohydrate, inspecting their faces and axes, carefully arranging them in the x-ray beam. In 1948 and 1949 she published studies about nucleobase structures.

In 1949, the same year Lindsey finished her PhD, Francis Crick arrived at the Cavendish. Four years later, he and James Watson published DNAﾒs double helix structure. Lindseyﾒs works were not cited in Watson and Crickﾒs influential 1953 Nature paper, but her contribution was included in an article published by the Royal Society a year later.