a biography of rosalind franklin

Rosalind Franklin

(1920-1958)

Who Was Rosalind Franklin?

Rosalind Franklin earned a Ph.D. in physical chemistry from Cambridge University. She learned crystallography and X-ray diffraction, techniques that she applied to DNA fibers. One of her photographs provided key insights into DNA structure. Other scientists used it as evidence to support their DNA model and took credit for the discovery. Franklin died of ovarian cancer in 1958, at age 37.

Early Years

Rosalind Elsie Franklin was born into an affluent and influential Jewish family on July 25, 1920, in Notting Hill, London, England. She displayed exceptional intelligence from early childhood, knowing from the age of 15 that she wanted to be a scientist. She received her education at several schools, including North London Collegiate School, where she excelled in science, among other things.

Franklin enrolled at Newnham College, Cambridge, in 1938 and studied chemistry. In 1941, she was awarded Second Class Honors in her finals, which, at that time, was accepted as a bachelor's degree in the qualifications for employment. She went on to work as an assistant research officer at the British Coal Utilisation Research Association, where she studied the porosity of coal—work that was the basis of her 1945 Ph.D. thesis "The physical chemistry of solid organic colloids with special reference to coal."

In the fall of 1946, Franklin was appointed at the Laboratoire Central des Services Chimiques de l'Etat in Paris, where she worked with crystallographer Jacques Mering. He taught her X-ray diffraction, which would play an important role in her research that led to the discovery of "the secret of life"—the structure of DNA. In addition, Franklin pioneered the use of X-rays to create images of crystallized solids in analyzing complex, unorganized matter, not just single crystals.

DNA, Scientific Discoveries and Credit Controversy

In January 1951, Franklin began working as a research associate at the King's College London in the biophysics unit, where director John Randall used her expertise and X-ray diffraction techniques (mostly of proteins and lipids in solution) on DNA fibers. Studying DNA structure with X-ray diffraction, Franklin and her student Raymond Gosling made an amazing discovery: They took pictures of DNA and discovered that there were two forms of it, a dry "A" form and a wet "B" form. One of their X-ray diffraction pictures of the "B" form of DNA, known as Photograph 51, became famous as critical evidence in identifying the structure of DNA. The photo was acquired through 100 hours of X-ray exposure from a machine Franklin herself had refined.

John Desmond Bernal, one of the United Kingdom’s most well-known and controversial scientists and a pioneer in X-ray crystallography, spoke highly of Franklin around the time of her death in 1958. "As a scientist Miss Franklin was distinguished by extreme clarity and perfection in everything she undertook," he said. "Her photographs were among the most beautiful X-ray photographs of any substance ever taken. Their excellence was the fruit of extreme care in preparation and mounting of the specimens as well as in the taking of the photographs."

Despite her cautious and diligent work ethic, Franklin had a personality conflict with colleague Maurice Wilkins, one that would end up costing her greatly. In January 1953, Wilkins changed the course of DNA history by disclosing without Franklin's permission or knowledge her Photo 51 to competing scientist James Watson, who was working on his own DNA model with Francis Crick at Cambridge.

Upon seeing the photograph, Watson said, "My jaw fell open and my pulse began to race," according to author Brenda Maddox, who in 2002 wrote a book about Franklin titled Rosalind Franklin: The Dark Lady of DNA.

The two scientists did, in fact, use what they saw in Photo 51 as the basis for their famous model of DNA, which they published on March 7, 1953, and for which they received a Nobel Prize in 1962. Crick and Watson were also able to take most of the credit for the finding: When publishing their model in Nature magazine in April 1953, they included a footnote acknowledging that they were "stimulated by a general knowledge" of Franklin's and Wilkins' unpublished contribution, when in fact, much of their work was rooted in Franklin's photo and findings. Randall and the Cambridge laboratory director came to an agreement, and both Wilkins' and Franklin's articles were published second and third in the same issue of Nature . Still, it appeared that their articles were merely supporting Crick and Watson's.

According to Maddox, Franklin didn't know that these men based their Nature article on her research, and she didn't complain either, likely as a result of her upbringing. Franklin "didn't do anything that would invite criticism … [that was] bred into her," Maddox was quoted as saying in an October 2002 NPR interview.

Franklin left King's College in March 1953 and relocated to Birkbeck College, where she studied the structure of the tobacco mosaic virus and the structure of RNA. Because Randall let Franklin leave on the condition that she would not work on DNA, she turned her attention back to studies of coal. In five years, Franklin published 17 papers on viruses, and her group laid the foundations for structural virology.

Illness and Death

In the fall of 1956, Franklin discovered that she had ovarian cancer. She continued working throughout the following two years, despite having three operations and experimental chemotherapy. She experienced a 10-month remission and worked up until several weeks before her death on April 16, 1958, at the age of 37.

QUICK FACTS

• Name: Rosalind Elsie
• Birth Year: 1920
• Birth date: July 25, 1920
• Birth City: Notting Hill, London, England
• Birth Country: United Kingdom
• Gender: Female
• Best Known For: British chemist Rosalind Franklin is best known for her role in the discovery of the structure of DNA, and for her pioneering use of X-ray diffraction.
• World War II
• Education and Academia
• Science and Medicine
• Astrological Sign: Leo
• Newnham College
• Cambridge University
• Death Year: 1958
• Death date: April 16, 1958
• Death City: London, England
• Death Country: United Kingdom

CITATION INFORMATION

• Article Title: Rosalind Franklin Biography
• Author: Biography.com Editors
• Website Name: The Biography.com website
• Url: https://www.biography.com/scientists/rosalind-franklin
• Access Date:
• Publisher: A&E; Television Networks
• Last Updated: June 15, 2020
• Original Published Date: April 2, 2014

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In this section

Dr. rosalind franklin.

A role model for our university, aspiring scientists, health professionals and those underrepresented in STEM

Our university was dedicated in 2004 to Rosalind Franklin, PhD, the brilliant and trailblazing scientist whose Photo 51 revealed the double helix of DNA — a discovery that was essential in unlocking the mystery to how life is passed down from generation to generation. Dr. Franklin’s passion for learning, her pursuit of extreme clarity and her unflinching commitment to the highest standards of scientific research brought “lasting benefit to mankind,” and make her an ideal role model for our students, faculty and aspiring scientists and for health professionals throughout the world.

A physical chemist, researcher and foremost expert in crystallography, Dr. Franklin’s renown grew out of the two years she spent conducting research at King’s College London in the early 1950s, as scientists across the globe raced to discover the structure of DNA. Working in a laboratory environment less than collegial to female scientists and often in isolation, Dr. Franklin patiently struggled to prove the structure through mathematical computations and to capture the B form of DNA through more than 100 hours of photographic exposure. While her Photo 51 and related data were integral to the 1953 discovery and description of the double helix structure of DNA, her contribution went largely unrecognized for nearly 50 years.

The story of Dr. Franklin who, despite gender disparity and discrimination, relentlessly pursued the answers to questions that have improved health and longevity around the world, speaks to new generations who take up the struggle for equality and improved well-being. Her perseverance and determination in the face of entrenched injustice offers hope to underrepresented groups across the academy, across STEM, across countries and economies that continue to fight for parity in compensation, advancement and recognition.

The fruits of Dr. Franklin’s life, her science and her drive for excellence will continue to impact the health of human beings for generations to come. Her namesake university — the first medical institution in the nation to so recognize a female scientist — honors ideals that can lead each generation to the advancement of science and “the improvement of the lot of mankind, present and future.”

Destined for Science

Rosalind Elsie Franklin was born in London on July 25, 1920, into a prominent family of Anglo-Jewish scholars, leaders and humanitarians who placed a high value on education and service. She was an intellectually precocious child who, according to her mother, “all her life knew exactly where she was going and took science for her subject” at the age of 16. She was a conscientious and gifted student with a keen sense of justice and logic and a facility for languages. She thrived on intellectual debate, challenging others to justify their opinions and positions, a method she used throughout her life to clarify her own understanding, to learn and to teach.

Rosalind was a devoted daughter and sister and loyal and gracious to her many friends and colleagues. Family members recall her lively sense of humor, her straightforwardness, her love of cooking. She was an experienced mountaineer who loved to travel and explore nature.

Rosalind’s early education in private preparatory and boarding schools prepared her for enrollment in Newnham College, one of two schools for women at Cambridge University. She majored in physical chemistry and held herself to high standards of scholarship. She refused to let the challenges of their time defeat or define her. She steadfastly pursued her education during World War II, despite the bombs that rained down on London during the Blitz, despite shortages and rationing and despite family pressure to leave Cambridge for safer ground and, perhaps, for work aiding the war effort. As the Nazis marched across Europe, she continued her studies while closely following the war, debating British foreign policy in letters to her family and volunteering as an air raid warden.

Her excellent exam scores earned her a graduate research scholarship, a grant from the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research, providing an excellent reason to stay at Cambridge despite the war. But she clashed with her supervising professor, R.G.W. Norrish, after discovering a fundamental error in the project he had assigned her. Professor Norrish refused to accept her findings and demanded she repeat the experiments. Rosalind wrote that Norrish “became most offensive” when “I stood up to him.” Norrish told a Franklin biographer years later that he did not approve of the junior investigator’s interest in “raising the status of her sex to equality with men.”

Dr. Franklin earned a bachelor’s in 1941 and the next year, as more women moved into academia and industry, she accepted a position with the British Coal Utilisation Research Association, where she designed and conducted experiments to understand the microstructures of carbons and coals — work that ultimately benefited the Allied cause.

Life and Work in Discovery

She earned a PhD in physical chemistry from Cambridge in 1945 at a time when few women were working as professional chemists or researchers. Her published thesis was titled “The Physical Chemistry of Solid Organic Colloids with Special Reference to Coal and Related Materials.”

The war in Europe at an end, Dr. Franklin spent the next four years pursuing postgraduate research at the Laboratoire Central des Services Chimiques de l’Etat in Paris. There, she enjoyed the freedom to pursue her interests. She learned and became an expert at the technique of crystallography, also called X-ray diffraction — a method that determines the arrangements of atoms in solids and crystals. Her expertise in revealing the structures of different carbons laid the groundwork for new industrial uses of carbon and aided in the development of heat-resistant materials.

By the age of 30, she was an an international authority on carbons, with numerous publications in peer-reviewed journals to her credit. In 1950, she was awarded a three-year Turner and Newall Research Fellowship at King’s College London to study changes in protein solutions. Dr. Franklin embraced the shift from physical to biological chemistry, but before she could begin her research, the assignment abruptly changed.

Having acquired a specially-prepared nucleic gel, King’s College instructed Dr. Franklin to apply her expertise in X-ray diffraction to the groundbreaking investigation into the structure of DNA. Her innovative use of the technology would soon prove key to discerning the helical structure of the DNA molecule.

She spent the first eight months at King’s working in close collaboration with PhD student Raymond Gosling to design and assemble a tilting micro camera and understand and refine the conditions necessary to get an accurate diffraction image of DNA. In May 1952, aided by Dr. Gosling and the special camera, Dr. Franklin suspended a tiny DNA fiber, the thickness of a strand of hair, and bombarded it with an X-ray beam, for 100 hours of exposure under carefully controlled relative humidity. Diffracted by the electrons in the atoms of the fiber, the rays produced a pattern on a photographic plate. Dr. Franklin performed mathematical computations to analyze the pattern in an attempt to reveal its structure.

Never had X-ray crystallography been put to such deft or momentous use. In April 1953, Dr. Franklin published Photo 51 in the same issue of the journal Nature in which Cambridge scientists James Watson and Francis Crick announced their double helix model of DNA. Dr. Franklin’s data corroborated this new model, but it’s not clear if she knew that her unpublished research had helped inspire and construct it.

Challenges at King’s

Throughout her work at King’s, Dr. Franklin struggled to cope with a less than collegial and sometimes hostile environment where she may have suspected anti-Semitism and sexism at play and where, according to at least one scientist interviewed by biographer Brenda Maddox, her work was undervalued. “Without benefit of academic appointment or rank,” she faced barriers to collaboration and communication from day one.

Dr. Franklin was drawn to the King’s lab by what proved to be misleading communications from Professor J.T. Randall, head of the male-dominated biophysics unit. While assigning her to take over the X-ray diffraction work at Kings, he neglected to share that decision with biophysicist Maurice Wilkins. Dr. Wilkins, who had been immersed in microscopic examination of DNA fibers but had begun using X-ray diffraction to study the samples, had urged Dr. Randall to hire Dr. Franklin based on the excellence of her postdoctoral research. He expected to help oversee her and interpret her photographs. But Dr. Franklin was led to believe by Dr. Randall that the DNA work was her sole territory.

Strained relations between Dr. Franklin and Dr. Wilkins were further fueled by miscommunications and by very different temperaments, and eventually by Dr. Wilkins’ increasing camaraderie with Dr. Watson and Dr. Crick at the competing Cavendish Lab, who were struggling to decipher DNA through modeling. Early in 1953, Raymond Gosling showed Photo 51 to Dr. Wilkins, who in turn showed it to Dr. Watson who immediately grasped the helical structure as essential to the replication of DNA. Dr. Watson would later write in his book “The Double Helix,” “The instant I saw the picture my mouth fell open and my pulse began to race.”

Photo 51, the luminous picture of the substance of life — the B form of DNA — was captured by Dr. Franklin through X-ray diffraction in May 1952. The lighter diamond shapes above and below and on either side of the darkened X suggest a pattern of a double helix. The diffraction pattern provided a wealth of structural information, which was required to build the model of DNA. The actual structure of the molecule resembles a spiral staircase comprised of two railings or sugar-phosphate backbones and steps, or four base pairs: adenine and thymine and guanine and cytosine.

Dr. Franklin’s work with DNA was spurred by a new energy and a new emphasis on biology that swept post-World War II science. The 1951 discovery of the alpha helix, a primary structure in proteins, by American scientist Linus Pauling also fueled the race to define the structure of DNA. Teams in the United States and United Kingdom competed, building on each other’s advances. They constructed models and employed Dr. Franklin’s specialty, X-ray crystallography, in a drive to understand DNA’s structure. Little did they know that the structure itself would provide the key to understanding how genetic information is transferred from one generation to another.

Dr. Franklin patiently refined the conditions necessary to obtain an accurate diffraction image of DNA. By controlling the water content of the fiber, she discovered that DNA exists in two forms — A and B. Photo 51 captured the B form of DNA with the aid of a micro camera designed, assembled and modified by Dr. Franklin. Within the camera she suspended a tiny DNA fiber the thickness of a strand of hair, and bombarded it with an X-ray beam for 100 hours of exposure under carefully controlled relative humidity. Diffracted by the electrons in the atoms of the fiber, the rays produced a pattern on a photographic plate. Analyzed through mathematical computation, the pattern proved instrumental to understanding the blueprint for life.

Meanwhile, Dr. Franklin prepared to leave King’s.

Virus Research

Dr. Franklin left King’s College in early 1953, at the invitation of her friend and mentor, J.D. Bernal, who was director of Birkbeck College’s Biomolecular Research Laboratory.

Another University of London school, Birkbeck was known for its egalitarian atmosphere. Dr. Franklin had worked under Dr. Bernal, the world’s leading crystallographer, as a postdoc in Paris.

A week before the groundbreaking Photo 51 was published in Nature, Dr. Randall sent Dr. Franklin a letter, addressed to her lab at Birkbeck, instructing her to stop working on — and stop thinking about — DNA. But Dr. Franklin was already turning her attention to more pioneering research — the study of plant viruses. She would go on to lead her team in decoding the structure of the tobacco mosaic virus.

By the mid-1950s, she was at the top of her field, preeminent in X-ray diffraction and sought after as a speaker for scientific conferences throughout Europe and the United States. Frequently she was the only woman presenter. In spite of her growing reputation and many published papers, Dr. Franklin had to fight for status and pay. She lacked job security. She struggled to obtain funding and equipment. After her fellowship ended, she received a three-year contract for virus research from the Agricultural Research Council (ARC), which offered her, with no explanation, a reduction in her salary entitlement and refused her the rank of principal scientific investigator.

Despite those humiliations, Dr. Franklin championed her science and the people who depended on her. She wrote to her ARC supervisor that the work of her group at Birkbeck concerned what was "probably the most fundamental of all questions concerning the mechanisms of living processes, namely the relationship between protein and nucleic acid in the living cell....Moreover,” she continued, “in no other laboratory, either in this country or elsewhere, is any comparable work on virus structure being undertaken.”

Dr. Franklin thrived on many trusting and fruitful collaborations with other scientists, particularly on coal and virus research, including at Birkbeck with Aaron Klug, a physicist, chemist and crystallographer. She made two extended trips to the United States, where she visited laboratories and both shared and gathered information on new findings and obtained funding — denied her in England — from the National Institutes of Health for her virus research.

Early death

Diagnosed with ovarian cancer in September 1956, Dr. Franklin continued to work and travel during periods of remission. She continued to push for financing for her research group at Birkbeck, which had been asked to build models of viruses for the Brussels World’s Fair. She died on April 16, 1958, the day before the opening of the fair, where the five foot-tall models drew great interest in the International Science Hall.

In a moving tribute, Dr. Bernal, who had been so instrumental to and supportive of her work, lauded Dr. Franklin’s “single-minded devotion to scientific research.” He wrote that her career “was distinguished by extreme clarity and perfection in everything she undertook.” Dr. Bernal credited Dr. Franklin with “ingenious experimental and mathematical techniques of X-ray analysis” that brought her very close to singlehandedly unraveling the mystery of how life is transmitted from cell to cell, from generation to generation.

Four years after Dr. Franklin’s death, Dr. Watson and Dr. Crick, along with Dr. Wilkins, accepted the 1962 Nobel Prize for the discovery and description of the structure of DNA, while Dr. Franklin’s brilliant illumination and critical data analysis went largely uncredited and unnoticed.

Rosalind Franklin published consistently throughout her career, including 19 papers on coals and carbons, five on DNA and 21 on viruses. Shortly before her death she and her team, including Dr. Klug, who won the Nobel Prize for chemistry in 1982, embarked upon research into the deadly polio virus.

Rosalind Franklin’s legacy

Dr. Franklin’s legacy lives on in her science, which continues to bring inestimable value to humankind, in her love for the natural world, and in her character. She set high standards for herself and others and diligently pursued answers to her questions despite the many obstacles she faced. Her next discovery was as close as her X-ray tube and spectrometer, as close as the laws of chemistry and physics, as certain as her conviction that “Science and everyday life cannot and should not be separated.”

The discovery of the structure of DNA sparked a revolution in the biological sciences and technology and expanded knowledge in many other fields. Based on the structure of DNA, the new science of molecular biology was born, leading to prevention, diagnosis and treatment in ways that were unimaginable in 1952. The advances in identification and analysis of the genetic code based on Dr. Franklin’s work have produced breakthroughs that changed the trajectory of science and will continue to improve the human condition.

On Jan. 27, 2004, Rosalind Franklin University of Medicine and Science became the first medical institution in the United States to recognize a female scientist through an honorary namesake. Then President and CEO Dr. K. Michael Welch hailed Dr. Franklin as “a role model for our students, researchers, faculty and all aspiring scientists throughout the world.” He declared Photo 51 as the university’s logo and declared “Life in Discovery” as its motto.

Reporting on the renaming ceremony, the Chicago Tribune noted that university officials remarked that taking the name of a “talented outsider who never got the credit to which she was entitled,” was an apt metaphor for the scrappy, independent university.

• Brenda Maddox. “Rosalind Franklin: The Dark Lady of DNA,” 2002.
• U.S. National Library of Medicine, Profiles in Science.“The Rosalind Franklin Papers.”
• Peter J.F. Harris. “Rosalind Franklin’s work on coal, carbon and graphite.” Interdisciplinary Science Reviews, 2001.
• Lynne Elkin. “Rosalind Elsie Franklin,” Jewish Women’s Archive.

Rosalind Franklin’s Life

The Institute aims to better visualise the inner workings of life, and to draw new understanding from this, is one of the reasons we are named in honour of Rosalind Franklin. A great experimental scientist, Franklin worked on a number of diverse scientific problems, most famously DNA, bringing incredible experimental skill, technological expertise and knowledge from across the sciences.

Here, Professor Patricia Fara, President of the British Society for the History of Science (2016-18), Clare College, University of Cambridge, writes on the life and work of Rosalind Franklin, a great figure in interdisciplinary science.

In addition, to mark 100 years since the birth of Rosalind Franklin, we recorded a podcast series about her life, work and legacy – listen here .

Rosalind Elsie Franklin (1920-58)

Since her early death at the age of 37, Rosalind Franklin has become mythologised as the victim of male prejudice, the unsung heroine who took the crucial X-ray photograph enabling James Watson and Francis Crick to build their double helix model of DNA, and was unjustly deprived of a Nobel Prize. She would neither have recognised nor endorsed this soundbite description. Franklin regarded herself first and foremost not as a woman, but as a scientist, and her DNA research occupied a relatively brief period in her successful career working on a variety of topics. In particular, on top of her famous investigations into DNA, she also made foundational contributions to modern understandings of coal, graphite and viruses.

Franklin’s surviving letters confirm the testimony of friends and family that she was a person of intense feelings and intelligence who was committed to scientific research but also fully enjoyed leisure activities – sports, sewing, travelling, entertaining. Expecting the high standards from others that she constantly demanded of herself, she prompted dislike as well as deep loyalty from colleagues. Throughout her life, her membership of a distinguished and extended close-knit Anglo-Jewish network based in West London remained of great importance to her: even though she was agnostic by inclination, she was proud of her Jewish identity. Determined to pursue an intellectual career from a young age, Franklin excelled at most subjects (except music), and was an exceptionally high-performing student who won numerous prizes, yet – like many young women – often privately lacked confidence in her own abilities, and was particularly apprehensive about examinations.

Franklin studied chemistry at Cambridge – although as a woman, she was not allowed to graduate – and subsequently engaged in national war work by joining the British Coal Utilisation Research Association in 1942. Using helium, she studied the porosity of coal, concluding that as the temperature increases, substances are expelled in order of molecular size. Her findings were valuable for predicting fuel performance and for manufacturing gas masks, and in 1945 Cambridge University awarded her a PhD.

After the War ended, Franklin gained a postdoctoral research position in a Parisian public chemistry laboratory through her close Cambridge friend, Adrienne Weill. Already a fluent French speaker, she experienced what was perhaps the happiest period of her life, working from 1947 to 1950 with Jacques Mering, who taught her the techniques of X-ray crystallography. Rather than analysing regular crystals, he specialised in amorphous substances such as nylon, and she applied his methods to examine the structure of coals and their transformation into graphite. This work was both practically and theoretically difficult, and her original scholarly papers remain significant in this field.

Missing England, after some hesitation she decided to accept the offer of a research fellowship at King’s College London. She was originally employed to study the molecular structure of proteins and lipids in solution, but the director John Randall reassigned her to work on DNA fibres, assisted by a PhD student, Ray Gosling. Maurice Wilkins was also involved in the DNA project, but from the outset, Randall failed to clarify the official relationship between them, which led to constant antagonism.

Franklin discovered that in dry conditions, the DNA molecule is short and fat; she called it the A form, to distinguish it from the long thin B form present during humidity. While Wilkins took over form B, which appeared to be helical, Franklin focussed on the more problematic A variety; under her direction Gosling took the crucial X-ray photograph 51, which looks like a simple cross but was technically extremely hard to obtain. By early 1953, Franklin had drafted papers suggesting that both forms included two helices, but had already accepted a position at Birkbeck College to escape from her increasingly intolerable situation. In the meantime, unknown to her, Wilkins had shown photograph 51 to Watson, who before Franklin’s articles had been published, incorporated her data to construct the successful double helix model with Crick at Cambridge.

This notoriously unpleasant and complex chain of events was mired in personal misunderstandings, resentments and ambitions, but also reflected contrasting approaches to scientific research. Whereas Franklin adhered to a methodological ideology, Crick and Watson built models as exploratory tools, without waiting until all the data had been compiled. Indeed, in their first brief announcement in Nature¸ Crick and Watson supplied no supporting experimental evidence other than Gosling and Franklin’s photograph 51. According to Watson’s account in The Double Helix (1968), the Cambridge team was willing to cut corners in the interests of elucidating DNA’s molecular structure; however, other scientists denied being aware of any such competitive race to be first, and many shared Franklin’s reservations.

In March 1953, several weeks before Crick and Watson published their findings in Nature, Franklin moved to John Bernal’s laboratory at Birkbeck College, where she worked closely with Aaron Klug. Benefitting from her crystallographic expertise, she explored the structure of RNA in the tobacco mosaic virus. In her first major publications on this new topic, she argued against the prevailing view that virus particles were different lengths, and she was later proved to be correct.

After diversifying to investigate other viruses, she successfully won 3 years of American funding, the largest award ever allocated to Birkbeck. Franklin also embarked on controversial research into live polio virus, but illness prevented her from completing the project. She was diagnosed with ovarian cancer in 1956 shortly after a work trip to California, and received surgery. Although she did return to the laboratory, she became increasingly weak, and was cared for by her family until she died.

Although, of course, it is impossible to be certain of further successes if she had lived longer, it does seem relevant that Klug was later awarded a Nobel Prize in chemistry for the project they had begun together. But she had already published almost thirty research articles, and so would undoubtedly have maintained and augmented her high reputation as a meticulous and innovative research scientist.

Patricia Fara

President of the British Society for the History of Science (2016-18)

Clare College, University of Cambridge

Further reading

More information about the life of Rosalind Franklin can be found from the following sources;

My Sister Rosalind Franklin

Jennifer Glynn, OUP Oxford, 2012

Rosalind Franklin: The Dark Lady of DNA

Brenda Maddox, HarperCollins UK, 2003

Rosalind Franklin and DNA

Anne Sayre, ADN, 1978

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Rosalind Franklin is known for her role (largely unacknowledged during her lifetime) in discovering the helical structure of DNA , a discovery credited to Watson, Crick, and Wilkins—received a Nobel Prize for physiology and medicine in 1962. Franklin might have been included in that prize, had she lived. She was born on July 25, 1920, and died on April 16, 1958. she was a biophysicist, physical chemist, and molecular biologist.

Rosalind Franklin was born in London. Her family was well-off; her father worked as a banker with socialist leanings and taught at the Working Men's College.

Her family was active in the public sphere. A paternal great-uncle was the first practicing Jew to serve in the British Cabinet. An aunt was involved with the women's suffrage movement and trade union organizing. Her parents were involved in resettling Jews from Europe.

Rosalind Franklin developed her interest in science at school, and by age 15 she decided to become a chemist. She had to overcome the opposition of her father, who did not want her to attend college or become a scientist; he preferred that she go into social work. She earned her Ph.D. in chemistry in 1945 at Cambridge.

After graduating, Rosalind Franklin stayed and worked for a while at Cambridge and then took a job in the coal industry, applying her knowledge and skill to the structure of coal. She went from that position to Paris, where she worked with Jacques Mering and developed techniques in x-ray crystallography, a leading-edge technique to explore the structure of the atoms in molecules .

Studying DNA

Rosalind Franklin joined the scientists at the Medical Research Unit, King's College when John Randall recruited her to work on the structure of DNA. DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid) was originally discovered in 1898 by Johann Miescher, and it was known that it was a key to genetics. But it was not until the middle of the 20th century when scientific methods had developed to where the actual structure of the molecule could be discovered, and Rosalind Franklin's work was key to that methodology.

Rosalind Franklin worked on the DNA molecule from 1951 until 1953. Using x-ray crystallography, she took photographs of the B version of the molecule. A co-worker with whom Franklin did not have a good working relationship, Maurice H.F. Wilkins, showed Franklin's photographs of DNA to James Watson—without Franklin's permission. Watson and his research partner Francis Crick were working independently on the structure of DNA, and Watson realized that these photographs were the scientific evidence they needed to prove that the DNA molecule was a double-stranded helix.

While Watson, in his account of the discovery of the structure of DNA, largely dismissed Franklin's role in the discovery, Crick later admitted that Franklin had been "only two steps away" from the solution herself.

Randall had decided that the lab would not work with DNA, and so by the time her paper was published, she had moved on to Birkbeck College and the study of the structure of the tobacco mosaic virus, and she showed the helix structure of the virus' RNA . She worked at Birkbeck for John Desmond Bernal and with Aaron Klug, whose 1982 Nobel Prize was based in part on his work with Franklin.

In 1956, Franklin discovered she had tumors in her abdomen. She continued to work while undergoing treatment for cancer. She was hospitalized at the end of 1957, returned to work in early 1958, but soon became unable to work. She died in April.

Rosalind Franklin did not marry or have children; she conceived of her choice to go into science as giving up marriage and children.

Watson, Crick, and Wilkins were awarded the Nobel Prize in physiology and medicine in 1962, four years after Franklin died. The Nobel Prize rules limit the number of people for an award to three and also limit the award to those who are still alive, so Franklin was not eligible for the Nobel. Nevertheless, many have thought that she deserved explicit mention in the award and that her key role in confirming the structure of DNA was overlooked because of her early death and the attitudes of the scientists of the time toward women scientists .

Watson's book recounting his role in the discovery of DNA displays his dismissive attitude toward "Rosy." Crick's description of Franklin's role was less negative than Watson's, and Wilkins mentioned Franklin when he accepted the Nobel. Anne Sayre wrote a biography of Rosalind Franklin, responding to the lack of credit given to her and the descriptions of Franklin by Watson and others. The wife of another scientist at the laboratory and a friend of Franklin, Sayre describes the clash of personalities and the sexism that Franklin faced in her work. Aaron Klug used Franklin's notebooks to show how close she had come to independently discovering the structure of DNA.

In 2004, the Finch University of Health Sciences/The Chicago Medical School changed its name to the Rosalind Franklin University of Medicine and Science to honor Franklin's role in science and medicine.

Career Highlights

• Fellowship, Cambridge, 1941-42: gas-phase chromatography, working with Ronald Norrish (Norrish won a 1967 Nobel in chemistry)
• British Coal Utilisation Research Association, 1942-46: studied physical structure of coal and graphite
• Laboratoire Central des Services Chimiques de l'Etat, Paris, 1947-1950: worked with x-ray crystallography, working with Jacques Mering
• Medical Research Unit, King's College, London; Turner-Newall fellowship, 1950-1953: worked on the structure of DNA
• Birkbeck College, 1953-1958; studied tobacco mosaic virus and RNA
• St. Paul's Girls' School, London: one of the few schools for girls that included scientific study
• Newnham College, Cambridge, 1938-1941, graduated 1941 in chemistry
• Cambridge, Ph.D. in chemistry, 1945
• Father: Ellis Franklin
• Mother: Muriel Waley Franklin
• Rosalind Franklin was one of four children, the only daughter

Religious Heritage: Jewish, later became an agnostic

Also known as:  Rosalind Elsie Franklin, Rosalind E. Franklin

Key Writings by or About Rosalind Franklin

• Rosalind Franklin and Raymond G. Gosling [research student working with Franklin]. Article in Nature published April 25, 1953, with Franklin's photograph of the B form of DNA. In the same issue as Watson and Crick's article announcing the double-helix structure of DNA.
• J. D. Bernal. "Dr. Rosalind E. Franklin." Nature 182, 1958.
• James D. Watson. The Double Helix. 1968.
• Aaron Klug, "Rosalind Franklin and the discovery of the structure of DNA." Nature 219, 1968.
• Robert Olby. The Path to the Double Helix. 1974.
• Anne Sayre. Rosalind Franklin and DNA. 1975.
• Brenda Maddox. Rosalind Franklin: The Dark Lady of DNA. 2002.
• Life and Work of Francis Crick, Co-Discoverer of DNA's Structure
• Understanding the Double-Helix Structure of DNA
• 5 Women Scientists Who Influenced the Theory of Evolution
• DNA Definition and Structure
• Women in Chemistry - Famous Female Chemists
• Women Scientists Everyone Should Know
• Most Influential Scientists of the 20th Century
• Inference in Arguments
• Get to Know These 91 Famous Female Scientists
• Har Gobind Khorana: Nucleic Acid Synthesis and Synthetic Gene Pioneer
• Chien-Shiung Wu: A Pioneering Female Physicist
• Nitrogenous Bases - Definition and Structures
• Chemistry Timeline
• Marie Curie: Mother of Modern Physics, Researcher of Radioactivity
• Biography of Rita Levi-Montalcini
• March Calendar

Rosalind Franklin: Biography & Discovery of DNA Structure

Many people recall that the structure of the DNA molecule has the shape of a double helix. Some may even recall the names of the scientists who won the 1962 Nobel Prize in Medicine for modeling the structure of the molecule, and explaining how the shape lends itself to replication. James Watson and Francis Crick shared the Nobel Prize with Maurice Wilkins, but many people feel that much of the credit for this world-shaking achievement should rightfully go to someone who was absent from that stage, a woman named Rosalind Franklin.

Rosalind Franklin was born July 25, 1920, and grew up in a well-known Jewish family in pre-World War II London, and was known in the family for being very clever and outspoken. Her parents sent her to St. Paul’s Girls’ School, a private school known for rigorous academics, including physics and chemistry. In an interview for PBS’ NOVA television episode titled "The Secret of Photo 51," two of her friends recalled memories of Franklin’s school days.

“She was best in science, best at maths, best in everything. She expected that if she undertook to do something, she would be in charge of it.” By the age of 15, over objections from her father, who thought she should go into social work; Franklin decided to become a scientist.

Franklin graduated from Newnham College at Cambridge in 1938 and took a job with the British Coal Utilization Research Association. She was determined to make a contribution to the war effort, and published several papers on the structures and uses of coal and graphite. Her work was used in development of the gas masks that helped keep British soldiers safer. Her work earned her a Ph.D. in Physical Chemistry awarded by Cambridge University in 1945.

In 1947, Franklin moved to Paris to take up a job at the Laboratoire Central working with Jacques Mering on perfecting the science of X-ray chromatography. By all accounts, she was very happy in Paris, easily earning the respect of her colleagues. She was known to enjoy doing the meticulous mathematical equations necessary to interpret data about atomic structure that was being revealed by the X-ray techniques. However, in 1951, she reluctantly decided it was necessary to move back to London to advance her scientific career.

Skirting a leftover bomb crater to enter the lab at King’s College in London, Franklin found she was expected to work with antiquated equipment in the basement of the building. She took charge of the lab with her customary efficiency, directing the graduate student, Raymond Gosling, in making needed refinements to the X-ray equipment.

She was annoyed when she discovered that she was expected to interrupt her work and leave the building for lunch every day. Women were not allowed in the College cafeteria. Nevertheless, she and Gosling were making progress in studying DNA when Maurice Wilkins, another senior scientist, returned from his vacation.

Wilkins was upset to learn that the female “assistant,” who he had expected would be working for him, was instead a formidable researcher in her own right. In this tense atmosphere, Franklin continued working to refine her X-ray images, using finer DNA fibers and arranging them differently for her chromatography, but she began to fear she had made a mistake in leaving Paris. Wilkins, also uncomfortable, began to spend more time at nearby Cavendish Laboratory with his friend Francis Crick. Crick and his partner, James Watson, were working on a model-based approach to trying to discover the structure of the DNA molecule.

Around this time, Franklin and Gosling made a startling discovery. There were two forms of DNA shown in the X-ray images, a dry “A” form and a wetter “B” form. Because each X-ray chromatograph had to be exposed for over 100 hours to form an image, and the drier “A” form seemed likelier to produce images in more detail, Franklin set aside the “B” form to study later. She noted that the “B” form images appeared to show a definite helical structure and that there were two clear strands visible in the image she labeled Photo 51 before she filed it away.

Around this time, Franklin attended a conference given at Cavendish to observe an early DNA model being proposed by Watson and Crick. She was quite critical of their work, feeling that they were basing their model solely on conjecture whereas her own work was based on solid evidence.

Her treatment of his friends widened the gap between her and Wilkins, leading to an even more strained relationship at King’s College. Franklin was so unhappy that people in the lab began to talk behind her back calling her the “Dark Lady.” In 1953, she decided to move to Birkbeck College to escape King’s. Somehow, during the move, Wilkins came to be in possession of Franklin’s notes and the files containing Photo 51. Wilkins removed the photo from her records without her knowledge or permission and took it to show his friends at Cavendish. [ Related: 'Lost' Letters Reveal Twists in Discovery of Double Helix ]

“My mouth fell open and my pulse began to race,” wrote Watson in his famous book, "The Double Helix." It was the one bit of information that he and Crick needed to complete an accurate model of the structure of DNA. Photo 51 was proof that DNA’s helical structure had two strands attached in the middle by the phosphate bases. They hurried to publish their findings in the journal Nature. The same issue of the journal published much shorter articles by Wilkins and Franklin, but placed them after the longer article by James Watson, seeming to imply that their work merely served to confirm the important discovery made by Watson and Crick rather than being integral to it.

Franklin, meanwhile, had moved on to Birkbeck. Part of the arrangement that allowed her to leave King’s was that she would not pursue any research on DNA, so she turned her talents to studying virus particles. Between 1953 and 1958, she made important discoveries about the tobacco mosaic virus and polio. The work done by Franklin and the other scientists at Birkbeck during this time laid the foundation of modern virology.

Franklin died on April 16, 1958, of ovarian cancer, possibly caused by her extensive exposure to radiation while doing X-ray crystallography work. Because the Nobel Prize can only be shared among three living scientists, Franklin’s work was barely mentioned when it was awarded to Watson, Crick and Wilkins in 1962. By the time "The Double Helix" was written in 1968, Franklin was portrayed almost as a villain in the book. Watson describes her as a “belligerent, emotional woman unable to interpret her own data.”

It is only in the past decade that Franklin’s contribution has been acknowledged and honored. Today there are many new facilities, scholarships and research grants especially those for women, being named in her honor.

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Untangling Rosalind Franklin’s Role in DNA Discovery, 70 Years On

Historians have long debated the role that Dr. Franklin played in identifying the double helix. A new opinion essay argues that she was an “equal contributor.”

By Emily Anthes

On April 25, 1953, James Watson and Francis Crick published a landmark paper in Nature, proposing the double helix as the long elusive structure of DNA, a discovery that a decade later earned the men the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.

In the final paragraph of the paper, they acknowledged that they had been “stimulated by a knowledge of the general nature of the unpublished experimental results and ideas” of two scientists at King’s College London, Maurice Wilkins and Rosalind Franklin.

In the 70 years since, a less flattering story has emerged, thanks in large part to Dr. Watson’s own best-selling book, “The Double Helix.” In the book, he not only wrote disparagingly of Dr. Franklin, whom he called Rosy, but also said that he and Dr. Crick had used her data without her knowledge.

“Rosy, of course, did not directly give us her data,” Dr. Watson wrote. “For that matter, no one at King’s realized they were in our hands.”

This account became a parable of poor scientific behavior, leading to a backlash against Dr. Watson and Dr. Crick and turning Dr. Franklin into a feminist icon. It also set off a long-running debate among historians: Precisely what role did Dr. Franklin play in the discovery of the double helix, and to what extent was she wronged?

In a new opinion essay , published in Nature on Tuesday, two scholars argue that what transpired “was less malicious than is widely assumed.” The scholars, Matthew Cobb, a zoologist and historian at the University of Manchester who is writing a biography of Dr. Crick, and Nathaniel Comfort, a historian of medicine at Johns Hopkins University who is writing a biography of Dr. Watson, draw upon two previously overlooked documents in Dr. Franklin’s archive.

These documents, they say, suggest that Dr. Franklin knew that Dr. Watson and Dr. Crick had access to her data and that she and Dr. Wilkins collaborated with them. “We should be thinking of Rosalind Franklin, not as the victim of DNA, but as an equal contributor and collaborator to the structure,” Dr. Comfort said.

Other experts said that the new documents were interesting but did not radically change the narrative; it has long been clear that Dr. Franklin played a key role in the discovery. “What this does is add a little new evidence to a trail, which leads directly to Franklin’s being a major participant,” said David Oshinsky, a historian of medicine at New York University.

And regardless of what Dr. Franklin knew about who had access to her data, the new documents do not change the fact that she did not receive adequate recognition for her work, some historians said.

“What is unequal and has always been unequal and is still unequal about Rosalind Franklin is the credit that she didn’t get in the aftermath of the discovery,” said Dr. Jacalyn Duffin, a hematologist and historian of medicine at Queen’s University, in Canada.

Seeing double

In the early 1950s, Dr. Watson and Dr. Crick were working together at the University of Cambridge, in Britain, trying to piece together the structure of DNA, largely by building models of the molecule.

At nearby Kings College London, Dr. Franklin and Dr. Wilkins were trying to solve the same puzzle experimentally, using X-rays to create images of DNA. (They had a famously fractious relationship, and largely worked separately.)

In “The Double Helix,” Dr. Watson suggested that his breakthrough came after Dr. Wilkins showed him one of Dr. Franklin’s images, known as Photograph 51. “The instant I saw the picture my mouth fell open and my pulse began to race,” Dr. Watson wrote.

That book was published in 1968, a decade after Dr. Franklin died of ovarian cancer at age 37, and it became the prevailing narrative of the discovery. But the real story was more complex.

In December 1952, Dr. Crick’s supervisor, the molecular biologist Max Perutz, received a report on Dr. Franklin’s unpublished results during an official visit to King’s College. Dr. Perutz later gave this report to Dr. Crick and Dr. Watson.

This data proved more useful to the pair than Photograph 51, said Dr. Cobb and Dr. Comfort, who found a letter that implies Dr. Franklin knew her results had made their way to Cambridge.

In the letter, which was written in January 1953, Pauline Cowan, a scientist at King’s College, invited Dr. Crick to an upcoming talk by Dr. Franklin and her student. But, Dr. Cowan wrote, Dr. Franklin and her student said that Dr. Perutz “already knows more about it than they are likely to get across so you may not think it worthwhile coming.”

That letter “strongly suggests” that Dr. Franklin knew the Cambridge researchers had access to her data and that she “doesn’t seem to have minded,” Dr. Cobb said.

Dr. Cobb and Dr. Comfort also found a draft of a never-published Time magazine article about the discovery of the double helix. The draft characterized the research not as a race but as the product of two teams that were working in parallel and occasionally conferring with each other.

“It portrays the work on the double helix, the solving of the double helix, as the work of four equal contributors,” Dr. Comfort said.

A question of credit

Elspeth Garman, a molecular biophysicist at the University of Oxford, said that she agreed with Dr. Comfort and Dr. Cobb’s conclusion, saying, “They got right that she was a full participant.”

But Dr. Perutz’s sharing of Dr. Franklin’s unpublished data is “slightly iffy,” she said. (In 1969, Dr. Perutz wrote that the report was not confidential but that he should have asked for permission to share it “as a matter of courtesy.”)

Still, other scientists and historians said they were puzzled by the arguments made in the Nature essay. Helen Berman, a structural biologist at Rutgers University, called them “sort of strange.” Of Dr. Franklin, she said, “If she was an equal member, then I don’t know that she was treated very well.”

Dr. Franklin and Dr. Wilkins each published their own results in the same issue of Nature that included Dr. Watson and Dr. Crick’s report, as part of a package of papers. But Dr. Berman wondered why the scientists did not collaborate on a single paper with shared authorship. And several scholars said that they thought the new essay minimized the wrongdoing by the Cambridge team.

Dr. Comfort said that he and Dr. Cobb were not “trying to exonerate” Dr. Watson and Dr. Crick, whom he said were “slow to fully acknowledge” Dr. Franklin’s contribution. Dr. Cobb said that the Cambridge scientists should have told Dr. Franklin that they were using her data. “They were ungallant,” he said. “They were not as open as they should have been.” But, he added, it wasn’t “theft.”

There is no evidence that Dr. Franklin felt aggrieved by what happened, historians said, and she became friendly with the Cambridge duo in the final years of her brief life. “As far as I can tell, there was no bad feeling,” Dr. Oshinsky said.

That might have changed had Dr. Franklin lived long enough to read “The Double Helix,” several scholars noted. “‘The Double Helix’ is just appalling,” Dr. Garman said. “It gives a very, very slanted view, and doesn’t give her the credit for the bits that they even used from her.”

Dr. Franklin’s early death also meant she missed out on the Nobel Prize, but the Nobel Assembly could have found other ways to acknowledge her contribution, said Nils Hansson, a historian of medicine at Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf, in Germany. Neither Dr. Watson nor Dr. Crick mentioned her when they accepted their awards, Dr. Hansson noted, although Dr. Wilkins, who also received the prize, did.

“She truly did get a raw deal,” said Dr. Howard Markel, a physician and historian of medicine at the University of Michigan and the author of “The Secret of Life,” a book about the discovery of the double helix. “Everyone likes to receive proper credit for their work. Everyone should care enough about their colleagues to ensure the process of fair play.”

Emily Anthes is a reporter for The Times, where she focuses on science and health and covers topics like the coronavirus pandemic, vaccinations, virus testing and Covid in children. More about Emily Anthes

The Mysteries and Wonders of Our DNA

Women are much more likely than men to have an array of so-called autoimmune diseases, like lupus and multiple sclerosis. A new study offers an explanation rooted in the X chromosome .

DNA fragments from thousands of years ago are providing insights  into multiple sclerosis, diabetes, schizophrenia and other illnesses. Is this the future of medicine ?

A study of DNA from half a million volunteers found hundreds of mutations that could boost a young person’s fertility  and that were linked to bodily damage later in life.

In the first effort of its kind, researchers now have linked DNA from 27 African Americans buried in the cemetery to nearly 42,000 living relatives .

Environmental DNA research has aided conservation, but scientists say its ability to glean information about humans poses dangers .

That person who looks just like you is not your twin. But if scientists compared your genomes, they might find a lot in common .

Rosalind Franklin

• Biographical Overview
• The Holes in Coal: Research at BCURA and in Paris, 1942-1951
• The DNA Riddle: King's College, London, 1951-1953
• Envisioning Viruses: Birkbeck College, London, 1953-1958
• Additional Resources
• Collection Items

Brief Chronology

• 1920 --Born Rosalind Elsie Franklin in London, July 25th
• 1931-38 --Educated at St. Paul's Girls School, London
• 1938 --Entered Newnham College, Cambridge University
• 1941 --BA in Physical Chemistry, Cambridge University
• 1941-42 --Research on the kinetics of polymerization reaction at the Physical Chemistry Laboratory, Cambridge
• 1942-46 --Research on colloidal properties of coals and cokes at the British Coal Utilisation Research Association (BCURA) Assistant Research Officer
• 1945 --Received PhD in Physical Chemistry from Cambridge
• 1947-51 --Directed a research group in x-ray diffraction studies of carbons at the Laboratoire Central des Services Chimiques de l'Etat in Paris
• 1951-53 --Assembled an x-ray diffraction laboratory at King's College, London, to research the structure of deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA); discovered that DNA can take two forms, "A" and "B"; produced diffraction photo of B form of DNA that confirmed Watson and Crick's theory of its double-helix structure
• 1953 --James Watson and Francis Crick announced their discovery of DNA structure in Nature on April 25, 1953. Franklin and Raymond Gosling published x-ray findings in same issue, noting that they are consistent with the model proposed by Crick and Watson
• 1953-58 --At invitation of J. D. Bernal, directed research on x-ray diffraction studies of plant viruses, particularly the tobacco mosaic virus (TMV) at Birkbeck College, London. Determined the configuration of TMV and the location of its RNA
• Summer 1954 --First visit to United States; presentations at coal research conference, and visits to many virus research labs
• Summer 1956 --Second visit to United States for conference presentations and visits to colleagues in virus research labs
• Fall 1956 --Diagnosed with ovarian cancer
• 1958 --Died in London on April 16th

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The Shalvi/Hyman Encyclopedia of Jewish Women

Rosalind elsie franklin.

by Lynne Elkin

The British scientist Rosalind Elsie Franklin (1920 – 1958), whose pioneering research helped lay the groundwork for the modern study and understanding of genetics, was known for her sociability and sense of fun, even as her independent thinking and unusual approaches meant that some of her most critical scientific work was done in isolation.

Institution: Online repository.

An influential British physical chemist, Rosalind Elsie Franklin earned her Ph.D at Cambridge in 1945 while researching the microstructure of coal, charcoals, and graphite. In 1947, she was offered employment in Paris; she spent the next three years there studying diffraction techniques. In 1950, John Randall recruited Franklin to work in his laboratory at King’s College, where he put her in charge of DNA diffraction studies. Franklin’s essential innovations, including her X-ray DNA photography and her work in distinguishing between “A” and “B” forms of DNA, allowed Frances Crick and James Watson to solve the structure of DNA as early as 1953. Her important role in their work went unacknowledged in most books and DNA science exhibits until the 1990s. Franklin died of ovarian cancer in 1958 at age thirty-seven.

Rosalind Franklin was an outstanding accomplished scientist, a fascinating individual with a strong personality, who made a lasting impression on everyone she met. Although best known for being the British physical chemist whose crucial experimental data enabled James Watson and Frances Crick to solve the structure of DNA as early as 1953, she received no gracious mention from either of them during their Nobel Prize speeches. Indeed, until 1968 when Watson wrote The Double Helix , she had only received vague credit for stimulating their work rather than specific credit for contributing to their original proposal . Although Anne Sayre’s 1975 biography discusses Rosalind Franklin’s contribution, it was unacknowledged in most books and DNA science exhibits until the 1990s. A British Museum Natural Science DNA exhibit in the 1960s omitted her name until a friend complained, but in March 2000, officials at King’s College, London named their new building the Franklin-Wilkins building, in honor of their two main DNA researchers. In addition to her expertise in the molecular structure of DNA, Rosalind Franklin was an expert in two other areas: the effects of heat on the microstructure of coal which included the changes that occurred during the conversion of some coals to graphite; and the quantitative analysis of the ultrastructure of the experimentally important RNA (Ribonucleic Acid) virus and TMV (Tobacco Mosaic Virus).

Family & Education

Rosalind Franklin was the second of five children born to Ellis Franklin (1894–1964) and Muriel (Waley) Franklin (1894–1976), both members of educated and socially conscious Jewish families that had arrived in England during the 1700s and 1800s. Rosalind’s father Ellis maintained the family wealth by following the Franklin tradition of merchant banking. Rosalind grew up surrounded by brothers—her older brother David, and her younger brothers Colin and Roland—until the birth of her sister Jenifer nine years later. From them Rosalind learned about competition, sports, and other things more typically of interest to boys—and often took to them more than her brothers. Although Ellis was much more politically conservative than his relatives, they were a close immediate family, prone to lively discussion and vigorous debates at which, according to sister Jenifer, the highly intelligent, logical, determined and articulate Rosalind excelled. Rosalind had such a strong independent streak that she would even argue with her assertive father. She was also unusual in that she ignored dolls, greatly preferring to craft items, draw, photograph, or read. Later in life she used her talent as an artist and machinist to first sketch, and then build her own molecular models and equipment. Even at a young age, Rosalind manifested the creativity and drive characteristic of the Franklin women, who were expected to focus their education, talents and skills on political, educational, and charitable forms of community service. Therefore, it was fairly unusual that young Rosalind expressed an early fascination with physics and chemistry classes at the academically rigorous St. Paul’s Girls’ School, and even more unusual that she earned a natural sciences degree, with a specialty in chemistry, at Newnham College, Cambridge in 1941. There she became close friends with French physicist Adrienne Weil, who greatly influenced Rosalind’s intellectual and independent development, as well as her affinity for French customs. However, during university vacations, Rosalind dutifully followed the family tradition of community service by working with the German-Jewish Refugee Committee at Woburn House, the London headquarters of the major Anglo-Jewish organizations.

Early Career

Rosalind’s “upper second” on her Cambridge final degree examinations qualified her for a graduate research scholarship, but she did not interact well with her supervisor, Professor R.G.W Norrish. One contributory reason, he expressed to Franklin biographer Anne Sayre, was that he did not approve of Rosalind’s interest in “raising the status of her sex to equality with men.” Instead, since Rosalind Franklin loved precise scientific experimentation, from 1942 to 1946 she did war-related work for the British Coal Utilization Research Association (BCURA). Stemming from her independent research there on the microstructure of coal, charcoals, and graphite, she published five fundamental and frequently cited papers, thereby earning her Ph.D. from Cambridge in 1945, as well as an offer of employment in Paris. Working with Jacques Méring at the Laboratoire Central des Services Chimiques de l’État between 1947 and 1950, she became proficient at applying X-ray diffraction techniques to imperfectly crystalline matter like coal—a skill responsible for her being recruited to work on DNA fibers. She maintained her interest in coal research throughout her professional career, almost annually publishing a paper on the structure of carbons.

During the four years Rosalind Franklin studied diffraction techniques with Méring in Paris, she passionately enjoyed both her professional and personal life. She made many friends in the laboratory, and often hiked with them on weekends. She preferred to live on her own modest salary, and frustrated her parents by continually refusing to accept money from them. She loved to travel and hike throughout Europe, preferring modest third-class accommodations to the first class her family could well afford, for the opportunity it provided her to pick up the rudiments of many languages and converse with everyday people in their own language. She excelled at speaking French and at French cooking and soon became more comfortable with egalitarian “French ways” than with conventional English customs.

Work at King’s College

Franklin seriously considered staying in France, but under professional advice from Dorothy Hodgkin about future scientific opportunities in England versus France, and because of pressure from her family, Rosalind decided to return home to England. Her experience in applying X-ray diffraction to non-crystalline substances influenced Professor John Randall, director of a special biophysics unit at King’s College, London, to recruit Rosalind to work in his laboratory, not realizing that Rosalind’s “French ways” and non-traditional tendencies would become a source of continual friction. Rosalind was just too different from everyone else at King’s in too many ways.

After Rosalind Franklin started working in Randall’s unit at King’s in January 1951, the consequences of her being so different were accentuated by the personality mismatch between herself and fellow DNA researcher Maurice Wilkins. She was quick, intense, assertive, and directly confrontational, while he was exceedingly shy, indirect and more slowly calculating to the point of appearing plodding. Even so, the problems these differences created might have stayed limited to a tolerable level except for a serious misunderstanding initiated by Randall. He had clearly handed over the DNA diffraction studies to Rosalind Franklin without informing Maurice Wilkins, who had most recently been working on DNA structure at King’s. He had also neglected to inform Franklin of his support for Wilkins’s continued interest in DNA. This promoted such hostility between these two that Franklin performed her precise and detailed technical work in professional isolation, with only graduate student Raymond Gosling for assistance and intellectual discussion.

Impact on Watson & Crick

Post-King’s College & Death

By 1953 Franklin was sufficiently unhappy at King’s that she left to work with the eminent biocrystallographer, Desmond Bernal, at Birkbeck College in London. Within five years she published seventeen papers on TMV, five alone, and twelve in collaboration with the team she directed. She proved that TMV’s peripheral-helically packaged protein component surrounded and embedded its linear strand of infectious RNA, approximately halfway out from its central hollow core. This was probably the first example of structural virology.

In 1956 Rosalind Franklin traveled widely in the United States and had fallen in love with one of the scientists she met, but she soon suffered the first symptoms of the ovarian cancer that was to cause her untimely death, so she immediately ended the relationship with this man. Two years later she died of the disease, at the age of thirty-seven. Always preferring to live on her modest salary, she left most of her inherited money to charity. In her obituary, Bernal stated, “As a scientist, Miss Franklin was distinguished by extreme clarity and perfection in everything she undertook. Her photographs are among the most beautiful X-ray photographs of any substance ever taken.” In 1982, when her closest Birkbeck colleague Aaron Klug received the Nobel Prize, he credited Rosalind Franklin during his acceptance speech with setting “the example of tackling large and difficult problems.”

Chomet, Seweryn. editor. D.N.A. Genesis of a Discovery . London: Newman-Hemisphere, 1995

Crick, Frances. What Mad Pursuit. New York: Basic Books, 1988

Glynn, Jenifer. My Sister Rosalind Franklin. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 2012.

Glynn, Jenifer (Franklin). “Rosalind Franklin.” In Cambridge Women: Twelve Portraits. Edited by Edward Shils and Carmen Blacker. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1996

Judson, Horace Freeland. The Eighth Day of Creation: The Makers of the Revolution in Biology. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1979. Expanded Edition, New York: Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press, 1996

Klug, Aaron. “Rosalind Franklin and the Discovery of the Structure of DNA.” Nature 219 (1968): 808–813

Klug, Aaron. “Rosalind Franklin and the Double Helix.” Nature 248 (1974)

Maddox, Brenda. Rosalind Franklin: The Dark Lady of DNA . New York: Harper Perennial, 2002

McGrayne, Sharon Bertsch. Nobel Prize Women in Science . New York: Birch Lane Press, 1993

Olby, Robert. The Path to the Double Helix. Seattle, Washington: University of Washington Press, 1974

Perutz, Max. “Letter to the Editor.” Science 164 (1969):1537–9

Piper, Anne. “Light on a Dark Lady.” Trends in Biochemical Sciences (268) volume 23 (1998): 121–156

Sayre, Anne. Rosalind Franklin and DNA. New York: Norton, 1975

Watson, James D. The Double Helix, Critical Edition ed. Gunther Stent. New York: Norton, 1980. (original edition was published in 1968)

Watson, James. “Letter to the Editor” (in response to Perutz). Science 164 (1969):1539

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How to cite this page

Elkin, Lynne. "Rosalind Elsie Franklin." Shalvi/Hyman Encyclopedia of Jewish Women . 27 February 2009. Jewish Women's Archive. (Viewed on April 25, 2024) <http://jwa.org/encyclopedia/article/franklin-rosalind>.

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• 21 July 2020

Rosalind Franklin was so much more than the ‘wronged heroine’ of DNA

You have full access to this article via your institution.

Credit: Science Source/SPL

At the centre of Rosalind Franklin’s tombstone in London’s Willesden Jewish Cemetery is the word “scientist”. This is followed by the inscription, “Her research and discoveries on viruses remain of lasting benefit to mankind.”

As one of the twentieth century’s pre-eminent scientists, Franklin’s work has benefited all of humanity. The one-hundredth anniversary of her birth this month is prompting much reflection on her career and research contributions, not least Franklin’s catalytic role in unravelling the structure of DNA.

She is best known for an X-ray diffraction image that she and her graduate student Raymond Gosling published in 1953 1 , which was key to the determination of the DNA double helix.

But Franklin’s remarkable work on DNA amounts to a fraction of her record and legacy. She was a tireless investigator of nature’s secrets, and worked across biology, chemistry and physics, with a focus on research that mattered to society. She made important advances in the science of coal and carbon, and she became an expert in the study of viruses that cause plant and human diseases. In essence, it is because of Franklin, her collaborators and successors, that today’s researchers are able to use tools such as DNA sequencing and X-ray crystallography to investigate viruses such as SARS-CoV-2.

Franklin’s research career began in the physical sciences. In some of her earliest work, in the 1940s, including her PhD, Franklin helped to determine the density, structure and composition of coal, a fossil fuel that was used widely to heat homes and to power industry. Franklin wanted to understand the porosity of coal, mainly to learn how to make it burn more efficiently. But, as Patricia Fara, a historian of science at the University of Cambridge, UK, points out, the porosity of coal was also a key factor in the effectiveness of Second World War gas masks, which contained activated-charcoal filters. As such, Franklin indirectly aided in the design of the personal protective equipment of her day.

The double helix and the ‘wronged heroine’

Franklin’s coal research established her reputation. Her first Nature paper, in January 1950, explored how certain electrons in carbon affect how it scatters X-rays 2 . The following year, she laid out her most important contribution to coal science: the discovery that the carbon formed as coal burns falls into one of two categories, graphitizing or non-graphitizing, and that each has a distinct molecular structure 3 . This work revealed the main difference between coke and char — two products of burning coal. Coke could be transformed into crystalline graphite at high temperatures, whereas char could not. The work also helped to explain why coke burns so efficiently — hot and with little smoke. This makes it useful in industrial processes that need to create vast quantities of heat, such as smelting in steel foundries.

From coal, Franklin moved on to the study of viruses, which would fascinate her for the remainder of her life. During the 1950s, she spent five productive years at Birkbeck College in London using her X-ray skills to determine the structure of RNA in the tobacco mosaic virus (TMV), which attacks plants and destroys tobacco crops. The virus was discovered in the 1890s, when researchers were attempting to isolate the pathogen that was harming the plants, and found that it was too small to be a bacterium.

Franklin produced detailed X-ray diffraction images, which would become her hallmark. At one point, she corrected James Watson’s interpretation of TMV’s helical structure. Knowledge of the virus’s structure allowed other scientists to forge ahead in the early days of molecular biology and use TMV as a model to help break the genetic code.

With the structure of TMV resolved, Franklin set out to study other plant viruses blighting important agricultural crops, including the potato, turnip, tomato and pea. Then, in 1957, she pivoted again to begin studying the virus that causes polio, which is structurally similar to the turnip yellow mosaic virus. At the time, polio was a feared communicable disease. It has since been mostly eradicated, although cases linger in Pakistan and Afghanistan.

Global connector

But time was not on Franklin’s side. In 1956, she was diagnosed with ovarian cancer, and she died two years later at the age of just 37. Her collaborators Aaron Klug and John Finch published the poliovirus structure the following year, dedicating the paper to her memory 4 . Klug would go on to be awarded the 1982 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his work on elucidating the structure of viruses.

Franklin was an inveterate traveller on the global conference circuit and a collaborator with international partners. She won a rare grant (with Klug) from the US National Institutes of Health. She was a global connector in the booming early days of research into virus structures: an expert in pathogenic viruses who had gained an international reputation and cared deeply about putting her research to use.

It is a travesty that Franklin is mostly remembered for not receiving full credit for her contributions to the discovery of DNA’s structure. That part of Franklin’s life story must never be forgotten, but she was so much more than the “wronged heroine” 5 , and it’s time to recognize her for the full breadth and depth of her research career.

Nature 583 , 492 (2020)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-020-02144-4

Franklin, R. E. & Gosling, R. G. Nature 171 , 740–741 (1953).

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Finch, J. T. & Klug, A. Nature 183 , 1709–1714 (1959).

Maddox, B. Nature 421 , 407–408 (2003).

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What was rosalind franklin’s true role in the discovery of dna’s double helix.

Two researchers say that the chemist knowingly collaborated with Watson and Crick

Rosalind Franklin was a chemist and X-ray crystallographer whose data contributed to the discovery of DNA’s molecular structure. That data wasn’t stolen from her, newly uncovered evidence suggests.

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By Tina Hesman Saey

April 26, 2023 at 12:59 pm

Rosalind Franklin’s role in the discovery of the structure of DNA may have been different than previously believed. Franklin wasn’t the victim of data theft at the hands of James Watson and Francis Crick, say biographers of the famous duo. Instead, she collaborated and shared data with Watson, Crick and Maurice Wilkins.

Seventy years ago, a trio of scientific papers announcing the discovery of DNA’s double helix was published. Watson, Crick and Wilkins won the Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine in 1962 for the finding. Franklin, a chemist and X-ray crystallographer, died of ovarian cancer before the prize was awarded and was not eligible to be included.

Many people have been outraged by accounts that Watson and Crick used Franklin’s unpublished data without her knowledge or consent in making their model of DNA’s molecular structure. What’s more, Franklin supposedly did not understand the significance of an X-ray diffraction image, taken by her graduate student, that came to be known as Photograph 51. Wilkins showed the image to Watson, who is said to have instantly recognized it as proof that DNA forms a double helix. And the rest is history.

Except that history is wrong, say Watson and Crick biographers Nathaniel Comfort and Matthew Cobb. Cobb is a zoologist at the University of Manchester in England, and Comfort, of Johns Hopkins University, is a historian of science and medicine. They uncovered historical documents among Franklin’s papers that they say should change the view of her contribution to the discovery.

Among the documents was an unpublished article from Time magazine depicting Watson and Crick as a team collaborating with Franklin and Wilkins, who were working as a pair. Overlooked letters and a program from a presentation to the United Kingdom’s Royal Society reinforced the idea that Franklin was a willing colleague who understood her data . The researchers laid out their findings in a commentary in the April 27 Nature .

Cobb and Comfort talked with Science News about their new view of Franklin’s contributions. The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

SN : Why did you decide to go through these documents?

Comfort: Matthew’s writing this biography of Crick, and I am writing a biography of Watson…. And we decided as a kind of pilgrimage to go and see the Franklin papers in person….

We weren’t expecting really anything other than just sort of a perfunctory visit when we sat down in this archive room together, and they pulled out the folders. We started going over them together, bouncing ideas back and forth saying, “Hey, what’s this?”

The sparks started flying, and that was when we found this magazine article from Time that was never published. It was a very rough draft that the author, named Joan Bruce, had sent to Franklin for fact-checking to make sure she got the science right.

Cobb: So what Nathaniel immediately picked up on in the Bruce article was the way that she presented the discovery. She presents it as being an equal piece of work — that the two groups, at King’s [College with Franklin and Wilkins] and at the Cavendish [Laboratory with Watson and Crick] in Cambridge, are effectively collaborating….

It’s not [the story] we’re used to hearing because the version we have is the dramatic Jim Watson version from his book The Double Helix: “Ha-ha! I stole their data!… Little did they know but I had it in my hands.” This is dramatic reconstruction.

Comfort: If it were this way [as in Bruce’s article], it actually gives the lie to Watson’s sensational account. And we know why — or at least I think I know why — Watson gave that sensational account.

The audience for The Double Helix was intended to be high school and college students who he wanted to get excited about science.… And I have lots of examples from that book where he stretches the truth, where he takes liberties, where he takes literary license. And I can show that as a pattern through the entire book. So it also fits with the style and tone of The Double Helix .

SN : Is there other evidence that Watson and Crick didn’t steal her data?

Cobb:  What we have separately done by looking in real detail at the records — the interviews that Crick did in the ’60s and so on — is we’ve been able to reconstruct the process that [Watson and Crick] went through. Which, if you read their papers really carefully, actually says quite explicitly that they engaged in what they called a process of trial and error. So they knew roughly the size of the crystal of the DNA molecule. They knew the atoms that should be in there from the density. So they tried to fit this stuff into this size using chemical rules.

Then there’s this report [on X-ray diffraction data] that was written by the King’s researchers, Franklin and Wilkins, as part of their funding from the Medical Research Council. It was shared with other laboratories, including the head of the laboratory in Cambridge, Max Perutz [Crick’s boss]. And this is all known, so we haven’t discovered this. Watson and Crick used some of the numbers in there from Franklin and Wilkins as a kind of check on their random walk-through of possible structures….

This still looks like kind of underhand, right? Because they’ve been given this semi-official document. Then two things happened. Firstly, if you read their documents, it’s quite clear that they do explain that they had access to this document, and that they used it as a check on their models. So this fact is acknowledged at the time….

We then stumbled upon a letter from a Ph.D. student who was at King’s College, called Pauline Cowan, who was a friend of Crick’s…. So Cowan writes this letter asking him for help with something completely uninteresting. Then she says in passing, “Franklin and Gosling” — that’s Franklin’s Ph.D. student who took Photograph 51 — “are giving a seminar on their data.” This is in January 1953. “You can come along if you want. Here’s the details. But they say that they’re not really going to go into much detail. It’s for the general lab audience, and Perutz knows all the results anyway. So you might not want to bother coming.”

In other words, Franklin knows that Watson and Crick will have access to this informal report, and she doesn’t care. It’s all, “Hey, if you want it, that’s fine.” So that then shifts the optic away from they got this surreptitious access to this MRC report. So we’re back to this collaborative [picture]. Franklin doesn’t seem to be too bothered.

And then the final element … we found a program of a Royal Society exhibition…. This is two months after the publication of the papers. [In the program] is a brief summary of the structure of DNA signed by everybody, presented by Franklin.

It was like a school science fair. She’s standing there in front of a model explaining it to everybody, and all their names are on it. So this isn’t a race that’s been won by Watson and Crick. I mean, they did get there first, don’t get us wrong. But it wasn’t seen that way at the time. They could not have done it without the data from Franklin. And Wilkins. And everybody — at least at this stage in 1953 — is accepting that and seems okay with it.

Just like the Joan Bruce article said. So this changes the mood, right? We’re moving away from the Hollywood thriller that Watson wrote, where he’s sneaked some data. That version is really exciting. It’s just not true. [We’re moving] to something that’s much more collaborative, modern in some respects, about sharing data.

Today, we focus on Franklin because we’re currently interested in equality, women’s oppression, and so on. We’re also obsessed with DNA. But people weren’t back then. DNA wasn’t then what it is now. [People might think] how could Franklin not have been livid? This was the secret of life and she had had it taken away from her. But it wasn’t and she didn’t.

SN : Did Franklin understand the importance of her data?

Cobb: Franklin was very skilled at being able to move DNA between two forms; what’s called the A form, which is the crystalline form which gives really precise images, and what’s called the B form. That form is what you get if there’s much more water around the molecule kind of pulling it into a different shape. And it was very clear from her notes that she thought that the B form was basically the loss of order, that it was disintegrating….

If you study the double helix story, there’s this this kind of enigma, because there are these two forms, A and B.  Franklin studies the A form … [but] it’s never been clear to anybody why she chose that form. And then we realized it’s because she’s a crystallographer. She’s a chemist. And if you’re a chemist, and you’re trying to find the crystalline structure of something, what are you going to look at? The crystal.

It’s easy in retrospect to get in a time machine and go back and whisper in her ear, “Hey, but what’s the inside of the cell like? It’s not very dry, you know. Maybe think about the other form.” But … you can’t do that. That’s against the rules….

Everybody who wants to favor Rosalind Franklin thinks that Watson and Crick were kind of sexist pigs who stole her data. The first bit of that description is probably accurate. The second bit isn’t. They certainly were pretty rude. But they did not steal the data.

This is the popular version of the story which we wanted to undermine. That this Photograph 51, which is the B form, is so striking that Watson, when he’s given a glimpse of it, can instantly realize its significance. According to the story he tells and people who are in favor of Franklin tell, this is the moment he steals her data.

But if you think about it for a minute, you think, “Well, why didn’t Franklin get it if it’s so obvious? This really smart woman who’s much smarter than Watson is about this aspect of science, but she doesn’t get it?” And the answer is very clear when you read her notes. She did get it and she didn’t care. She knew it was some kind of helix, but that was not the structure that interested her.

What [the popular story] does is it removes any agency from Franklin. People are inadvertently presenting her as a negative version, the version that Watson presents. She’s the heroine, but she hasn’t gotten it yet. Why hasn’t she got it? Well, the only implication is what Wilkins says; that she was stubborn and blinkered, which is just not true. So we’re trying to put her back at the center of the story, make her much more human than this harridan that Watson presents her as.

SN : Do we know if Franklin complained at the time about her data being stolen?

So after the double helix [discovery], Franklin and Wilkins never question Watson and Crick, “How did you do this?” They never fall out with them. They never have a row. They never write anything. Either they were stupid and never asked the question, or they knew [that the data were shared fairly].

Then in [19]54, for example, Franklin’s going to the East Coast to go to this meeting on the West Coast that Watson’s going to as well. And so she writes to Watson, “Dear Jim, I gather you’re getting a car across the states. Can I come with you?” So she tried to hitch a ride on a transcontinental car journey with this man who supposedly had stolen life’s secret from under her nose. That doesn’t make sense.

She was on collegial terms — I don’t think she liked him — but she was on collegial terms with Jim…. They had extensive correspondence because they were in the same area of viral structure.

In the last two or three years of her life, she became very good friends with Crick and with his wife. They went on holiday together in Spain after a conference. After she had her first two operations for ovarian cancer, she went to the Cricks to convalesce. She would send Crick her draft articles and ask his advice. So she clearly didn’t think he was a pig who was going to steal all of that data.

SN: So they were just much more chill about the whole thing?

Cobb: They were all much more chill. We look at this, one, through a feminist optic. We being the world. It’s an inverse version of The Double Helix . And, two, through the optic of what would it be like today to discover this? Clearly, you’d have competing labs, they would not talk to each other, and if one of them had these data, then they would behave exactly like Watson describes it.

But that was not the world of the 1950s. Partly because DNA was not DNA. It wasn’t clear that it was the genetic material [of life]. So it wasn’t a big deal.

On Franklin’s tomb there is no mention of DNA. What there is mention of is viruses.  Because that’s the practical work that she was engaged in when she died. She had worked out the structure of the polio virus. DNA wasn’t a practical thing for another 20 years. Whereas the structure the polio virus, maybe that could save lives.

The way we see her is not how she was seen at the time. She was very famous. She got a page obituary in Nature , obituaries in Britain’s the Times and the New York Times . So many of her American colleagues were utterly distraught when they discovered that she died [in 1958]. So you know, she was a very significant person, not just for DNA.

SN : Dr. Watson is still living. Have you spoken with him or anyone else who’s still around that could offer some insight?

Comfort: I’ve spoken with him many times, and he knows about this project. But he’s not in any [physical] shape right now to be able to comment on something like this. Believe me, I would love to, but it’s just not possible.

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Concept 19 The DNA molecule is shaped like a twisted ladder.

• James Watson (1928-)
• Francis Crick (1916-2004)
• Maurice Wilkins (1916-2004)

Rosalind Franklin (1920-1958)

Rosalind Elsie Franklin was born in London, England. Her family was well-to-do and both sides were very involved in social and public works. Franklin's father wanted to be a scientist, but World War I cut short his education and he became a college teacher instead. Rosalind Franklin was extremely intelligent and she knew by the age of 15 that she wanted to be a scientist. Her father actively discouraged her interest since it was very difficult for women to have such a career. However, with her excellent education from St. Paul's Girls' School ? one of the few institutions at the time that taught physics and chemistry to girls ? Franklin entered Cambridge University in 1938 to study chemistry.

When she graduated, Franklin was awarded a research scholarship to do graduate work. She spent a year in R.G.W. Norrish 's lab without great success. Norrish recognized Franklin's potential but he was not very encouraging or supportive toward his female student. When offered the position as an assistant research officer at the British Coal Utilization Research Association (CURA), Franklin gave up her fellowship and took the job.

CURA was a young organization and there was less formality on the way research had to be done. Franklin worked fairly independently, a situation that suited her. Franklin worked for CURA until 1947 and published a number of papers on the physical structure of coal.

Franklin's next career move took her to Paris. An old friend introduced her to Marcel Mathieu who directed most of the research in France. He was impressed with Franklin's work and offered her a job as a "chercheur" in the Laboratoire Central des Services Chimiques de l'Etat. Here she learned X-ray diffraction techniques from Jacques Mering.

In 1951, Franklin was offered a 3-year research scholarship at King's College in London. With her knowledge, Franklin was to set up and improve the X-ray crystallography unit at King's College. Maurice Wilkins was already using X-ray crystallography to try to solve the DNA problem at King's College. Franklin arrived while Wilkins was away and on his return, Wilkins assumed that she was hired to be his assistant. It was a bad start to a relationship that never got any better.

Working with a student, Raymond Gosling, Franklin was able to get two sets of high-resolution photos of crystallized DNA fibers. She used two different fibers of DNA, one more highly hydrated than the other. From this she deduced the basic dimensions of DNA strands, and that the phosphates were on the outside of what was probably a helical structure.

She presented her data at a lecture in King's College at which James Watson was in attendance. In his book The Double Helix , Watson admitted to not paying attention at Franklin's talk and not being able to fully describe the lecture and the results to Francis Crick. Watson and Crick were at the Cavendish Laboratory and had been working on solving the DNA structure. Franklin did not know Watson and Crick as well as Wilkins did and never truly collaborated with them. It was Wilkins who showed Watson and Crick the X-ray data Franklin obtained. The data confirmed the 3-D structure that Watson and Crick had theorized for DNA. In 1953, both Wilkins and Franklin published papers on their X-ray data in the same Nature issue with Watson and Crick's paper on the structure of DNA.

Franklin left Cambridge in 1953 and went to the Birkbeck lab to work on the structure of tobacco mosaic virus. She published a number of papers on the subject and she actually did a lot of the work while suffering from cancer. She died from cancer in 1958.

In 1962, the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was awarded to James Watson, Francis Crick, and Maurice Wilkins for solving the structure of DNA. The Nobel committee does not give posthumous prizes.

DNA was first crystallized in the late 70's — remember, the 1953 X-ray data were from DNA fibers. So, the real "proof" for the Watson-Crick model of DNA came in 1982 after the B-form of DNA was crystallized and the X-ray pattern was solved.

If the DNA of one human cell is stretched out, it would be almost 6 feet long and contain over three billion base pairs. How does all this fit into the nucleus of one cell?

Funded by --> The Josiah Macy, Jr. Foundation © 2002 - 2011, DNA Learning Center , Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory . All rights reserved.

• CLASSICAL GENETICS

• GENETIC ORGANIZATION AND CONTROL

15 Facts About Rosalind Franklin

By a.k. whitney | oct 6, 2022, 12:47 pm edt.

Today would have been the 100th birthday of English chemist Rosalind Franklin, a brilliant and dedicated scientist best known for the honor denied her: the 1962 Nobel Prize for discovering the structure of DNA. Here are 15 facts about the noted scientist.

1. Rosalind Franklin discovered her calling early, but her father didn't believe that women should be college-educated. 

Rosalind Elsie Franklin was born in London in 1920. She was one of five children born into a wealthy Jewish family. She decided she wanted to become a scientist at 15, and passed the admissions exam for Cambridge University. However, her father, Ellis, a merchant banker, objected to women going to college and refused to pay her tuition. Her aunt and mother finally managed to change his mind, and she enrolled at Cambridge's all-female Newnham College in 1938.

2. Rosalind Franklin attended college with another woman who didn't get full credit for her work.

Bletchley Park cryptanalyst Joan Clarke was a few years older than Franklin, but they were both at Newnham in the late 1930s. Clarke would go on to be recruited for the war effort, cracking the German Enigma codes. The full scope of Clarke's work is still unknown, due to government secrecy.

3. Rosalind Franklin's university refused to acknowledge her scholastic achievements for years.

Despite Newnham College having been at Cambridge since 1871, the university refused to accept women as full members until 1948, seven years after Franklin earned the title of a degree in chemistry. Oxford University started granting women's degrees in 1920.

4. Rosalind Franklin's research on coal aided the aerospace industry.

After graduation, Franklin got a job at the British Coal Utilization Research Association (BCURA), where she researched coal and charcoal, and how it could be used for more than fuel. Her research formed the basis for her 1945 doctoral dissertation; it and several of her later papers on the micro-structures of carbon fibers played a role in the eventual use of carbon composites in air- and spacecraft construction.

5. Rosalind Franklin's male colleagues were hostile and undermined her research.

Franklin had a direct nature and was unwilling to be traditionally feminine. One reason she left Cambridge to work on coal was that her doctoral supervisor did not like her and believed women would always be less than men. When she was hired in 1951 at King's College, London, to work on DNA, she clashed with researcher Maurice Wilkins, who had thought she was his assistant, not his equal. Meanwhile, Franklin was under the impression that she'd be completely independent. Their relationship got worse and worse the longer they worked together. Wilkins went so far as to share Franklin's research without telling her with James Watson and Francis Crick—even though they were technically his competitors, funded by Cambridge University. Watson was particularly nasty about Franklin in his 1968 book, The Double Helix , criticizing her appearance and saying she had to be “put in her place.”

6. How events unfolded in the discovery of DNA's structure is still debated today.

Many books have been written hashing over events, either criticizing Watson and Crick, saying they stole Franklin's research, or defending the duo, saying her research helped them but that Franklin would not ultimately have reached their conclusions on her own. Though Franklin and Watson never became friendly, Crick and his wife welcomed Franklin into their home while she was being treated for ovarian cancer.

7. Rosalind Franklin's work may have led to her untimely death.

Franklin died of cancer in 1958. She was 37. Though genetics likely played a part in her illness, her work with crystal x-ray diffraction, which involved constant exposure to radiation, did not help. She is not the first woman in science to risk her health for her research. Marie Curie died from aplastic anemia, which has been tied to radiation exposure. Many of Curie's personal belongings, including her cookbooks, are too radioactive to handle even today.

8. Had Rosalind Franklin lived longer, she may have qualified for more than one Nobel Prize.

The first, of course, would have been awarded with Watson, Crick, and Wilkins, had they been made to share credit with her. (Pierre Curie had to ask the Nobel Committee to add his wife to the nomination in 1903.) As for the second, chemist Aaron Klug won the prize in 1982, carrying on work he and Franklin had started on viruses in 1953, after she left King's College. Because of the rules at the time of her death about awarding prizes posthumously (and in 1974 all posthumous awards were eliminated, the sole exception being in 2011), Franklin has none.

9. Despite being denied the Nobel Prize, Rosalind Franklin's contributions have been acknowledged and honored by many academics.

In 2004, the Chicago Medical School renamed itself the Rosalind Franklin University of Medicine and Science. She has also had a number of academic programs, auditoriums, and labs named for her. In 2013, Newnham College principal Dame Carol Black helped install a plaque commemorating Franklin at the Eagle Pub in Cambridge. Crick and Watson, who already had a plaque in the pub, drank there often while working on the DNA project, and allegedly boasted about discovering “the secret of life” to other patrons.

10. Rosalind Franklin is the subject of several biographies.

The first, 1975's Rosalind Franklin and DNA , was written by her friend Anne Sayre, largely as a reaction to Watson's The Double Helix . In 2002, Brenda Maddox published Rosalind Franklin: The Dark Lady of DNA .

11. There's an object in space named after Rosalind Franklin.

In 1997, amateur Australian astronomer John Broughton discovered an asteroid, which he named 9241 Rosfranklin.

12. At least one history rap battle is about Rosalind Franklin.

It was produced by seventh graders in Oakland, California (with some help from teacher Tom McFadden ). And it is delightful.

13. Rosalind Franklin has been immortalized on the small screen as well as on the big stage.

In 1987, BBC's Horizon series aired The Race for the Double Helix , starring Juliet Stevenson as Franklin. Jeff Goldblum played Watson. In 2011, playwright Anna Ziegler premiered a one-act about Franklin called Photograph 51 . It opened on the West End in 2015, starring Nicole Kidman as Franklin.

14. The 2015 run of  Photograph 51  reignited the old controversy.

While Kidman got much praise from critics for her turn as Franklin in Photograph 51 , Maurice Wilkins' friends and former colleagues have taken exception to a scene where Wilkins takes a photograph—the titular Photo 51, which showed evidence of DNA's structure—from Franklin's desk when she isn't there, saying he would never have done something so dishonorable.

15. The play  Photograph 51  may be adapted to the big screen.

In 2016, the West End production's director, Michael Grandage, told The Hollywood Reporter that he hopes to turn the play into a film—with Kidman reprising the role.

This story has been updated for 2020.