Women Scientists

Rosalind Franklin 1920-1958

At a glance:

outstanding X ray crystallographer who made an important contribution to the understanding of the structure of DNA

Franklin was educated at St Paul's Girls School and then at Cambridge graduating in chemistry during the war years. She first worked for an organisation researching coal before spending several years in Paris, on the same subject. In 1951 she began work at King's College London where she was directed to X ray diffraction of DNA, the molecule of inheritance. Watson and Crick indirectly obtained a pre-publication version of Franklin's diffraction data giving them insights into DNA's structure. They published their famous paper in Nature in 1953 with a small footnote to Franklin's data. Franklin went on to work on the structure of tobacco mosaic virus at Birkbeck College. She died from ovarian cancer at the age of 38, four years before the award of the Nobel Prize to Crick, Watson and Wilkins in 1962. Franklin was not mentioned in their Nobel prize acceptance speeches. Watson provided a coarse caricature of her in his subsequent book 'The Double Helix' which was then countered vociferously by Sir Aaron Klug. Although Franklin's contribution to this key discovery has been recognised in many ways since her death, there remains a lingering sense that she has been unfairly treated and deserved better.
Rosalind Franklin

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