Rosalind Franklin

   Rosalind Franklin was born in London England in 1920. As a little girl she was astoundingly smart for her age. Her parents sent her to St. Paul's Girls School where she graduated a year early and went to Cambridge University to major in physics and chemistry in 1938. There, she was introduced to x-ray crystallography. She then joined the war effort doing research on coal. Her research led to better gas masks, publishing five landmark papers, and being awarded her PhD. After the war she landed a research position in Paris and took on x-ray diffraction. She spoke in conferences and published articles in journals. Over a short period of time, she exceeded unsafe levels of x-ray radiation and was put out of the lab for a few months. So she decided to attend King College London where she was hired by JT Randall to discover DNA in January 1951. When she went in she was supposed to be Maurice Wilkins' assistant but he was away on vacation. He come back to find that Franklin took over his lab as well as his PhD student, Raymond Gosling, which was all due to miscommunication from the leader Randall.
   James Watson comes to London to study DNA where he teams up with Francis Crick to make a model of the DNA structure. Meanwhile, Franklin discovered two distinct forms of DNA, A and B. In November 1951, Crick sent Watson to Franklin's lecture about her A and B discovery to try and get information to help them build they're DNA model. Within a week after her lecture, they invite her to see they're model at Cambridge University where they were embarrassed after she told them it was completely wrong. So Lawrence Bragg, the head of the Cavendish Laboratory, told them they couldn't make anymore models because they humiliated him.
   In May 1952, Franklin sets up an x-ray diffractometer to take a better picture of the B form. In her results, she gets a clearer, sharper image of B and labels it Photo 51 and puts it safely away while she works on form A. At the end of the year, she decides to leave Cambridge University due to the rude people but kept up her work and study. Some how in the mix of her leave, her Photo 51 gets leaked to Wilkins. Linus and his son Peter Pauling did model building and knew almost as much as Franklin did. Watson warned Franklin that Pauling was going to beat them to the DNA secret if she didn't go in with him and Crick and publish it but she said no. Wilkins shows Watson Photo 51 and Watson shows Crick and they begin making another model with permission from Bragg on February 4th, 1953. On February 28th, 1953, the model was complete. Franklin was amazed and didn't understand how they knew without her detailed photos. Articles were released in Nature on April 25th, 1953 stating Crick and Watson's untruthful discovery and gave no mention of Franklin's photo.
   After leaving Cambridge, Franklin attended Birkbeck University of London where she led the virus research lab from 1953-1958. There, she collaborated with Aaron Klug working out the complex structure of a virus and locating it's infectious element. Together, they won a Nobel Prize. In 1956, she celebrated her 36th birthday by visiting universities in California and climbing Mt. Whitney. At the end of her trip, she began to suffer from severe abdominal pains. When she returned home, she was diagnosed with cancer believed to be caused from years of x-ray radiation. Even with the disease, she still studied every day, feeling as if she were too busy to die. She soon died on April 16th, 1958.
   In 1962, James Watson, Francis Crick, and Maurice Wilkins won the Nobel Prize for the discovery of the structure of DNA. None of the three acknowledged Rosalind Franklin for her unknowing contribution to the discovery. In 1968, James Watson published a best seller book entitled The Double Helix. In the book, he admits he wouldn't have ben able to finish his work without her findings and that he used them without permission. When Aaron Krug was awarded the Nobel Prize, he honored her contribution to the study of DNA in mentioning her name and her hard work.

 

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