Franklin, Rosalind
Rosalind Franklin (1920–1958) was the daughter of a prominent London banking family, where all children—girls and boys—were encouraged to develop their individual aptitudes. She held her undergraduate and graduate degrees in chemistry from Cambridge University. During World War II she gave up her research scholarship to contribute to the war effort at the British Coal Utilization Research Association, where she performed fundamental investigations on the properties of coal and graphite. After the war she joined the Laboratoire Centrale des Services Chimiques de l'Etat in Paris, where she was introduced to the technique of X-ray crystallography and rapidly became a respected authority in this field. In 1951 she returned to England to King's College, London, where her charge was to upgrade the X-ray crystallographic laboratory there for work with DNA. Franklin's excellent X-ray photographs were critical to the discovery of the DNA double helix structure, made by James Watson and Francis Crick in 1953. Later, Franklin went to Birkbeck College, London, to work. Before her death she made important contributions to the X-ray crystallographic analysis of the structure of the tobacco mosaic virus—a landmark in the field.
Franklin died of cancer at the age of 37, and thus was unable to share in the Nobel Prize awarded for the discovery of the double helix.
Further Reading
- American Chemical Society
- Chemical Heritage Foundation
- Society of Chemical Industry
- The Chemists' Club