Rosalind Franklin – 1920 – 1958
Born: July 25, 1920, Notting Hill, London, United Kingdom
Died: April 16, 1958 (age 37 years), Chelsea, London, United Kingdom
Rosalind Franklin was unarguably the discoverer of the structure of DNA as a double helix through her x-ray crystallography work with the molecule. It is known that her x-ray films were shared with Watson and Crick without her knowledge by Maurice Wilkins, a colleague. They later published the paper that revealed DNAs structure to the world and later shared the Nobel Prize for the discovery. It is notable than neither man mentioned her in their acceptance speeches.
Rosalind Franklin was born in London, England, on July 25th, 1920, to a Jewish family. As a child she displayed an exceptional intellect. She attended a private school from the age of 6 before attending a boarding school at 9. At 11 she attended St Paul’s Girls School in London where she excelled in science, Latin and sports, and learned to speak German and fluent French.
She matriculated into Newham College, Cambridge in 1938 studying chemistry. She received second-class honors in her finals in 1941. Cambridge didn’t award BA or MA degrees to women until 1947 when the previous women graduates were awarded their degrees too.
During WWII she served her National Service as an assistant research officer studying the porosity of coal for the British Coal Utilization Research Association (BURCA). Her work on the porosity of coal led to the more efficient use of it as a fuel, and to a better understanding of the performance of gas masks. This work and the scientific papers she published about her findings led to the award of her PhD by the University of Cambridge in 1945.
When the war ended and her national service came to an end, Franklin looked for a new opportunity. She found it in Paris, France, working with Jacques Mering, a crystallographer specializing in the structure of amorphous solids. X-Ray crystallography had been applied to divining the structure of crystalline solids for decades. The techniques and processes required in this work were well established. The X-Ray crystallography of amorphous materials was a very new pursuit. Franklin quickly learned of the specialized techniques needed in this new application of crystallography. She applied them to the structural changes in the formation of graphite as carbon is heated, publishing several papers on her work.
In 1951 Franklin took up a three-year fellowship at King’s College, London. Since she was the only experienced X-Ray crystallographer at King’s, she was directed to research the structure of DNA. It was in this pursuit that the skills she learned in Paris came into their own. Sadly, there was much dispute between herself and Maurice Wilkins who had been studying DNA but was reassigned by John Randall, the laboratory director. Wilkins not only had to transfer his equipment to Franklin, but he also had to transfer supervision of his graduate student, Raymond Gosling, to Franklin resulting in a sour relationship between the two.
It is not therefore surprising that the subsequent search for the structure of DNA was fraught with dispute, subsequently leading to Watson, Crick and Wilkins claiming the prize without ever producing their own diffraction results.
Franklin died of ovarian cancer in 1958, four years before the Nobel Prize for DNA was awarded.
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