Born: July 25, 1920, London, England
Died: April 16, 1958, London
Rosalind Elsie Franklin was a British physical chemist whose groundbreaking research led to the discovery of the double-helix structure of deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA), a molecule found in all living cells that contains the genetic material passed from one generation to the next. Franklin died four years before the Nobel Prize in chemistry was awarded to her colleague Maurice Wilkins, along with American biochemist James Watson and British biochemist Francis Crick, for their work in the discovery of the structure of DNA. Controversy continues today over whether Franklin might have shared in this prize had she lived. Key data about DNA’s structure, discovered by Franklin, were given to Watson and Crick without her knowledge. These data, together with their own findings, allowed Watson and Crick to solve the enigma of DNA’s structure.
Born in London, Franklin enrolled at Newnham College of the University of Cambridge in 1938, graduating in 1941. She continued her education at Cambridge while working at the British Coal Utilization Research Association, earning a Ph.D. degree in physical chemistry in 1945. During this period she performed important research on the physical structure of coal and carbon, publishing five papers on topics related to this work. By the end of her career, she had authored 17 articles on the structures of coal and carbon.
In 1947, Franklin travelled to Paris where she spent three years at the Laboratoire Central des Services Chimiques de l’Etat. She learnt how to use X-ray diffraction techniques to study the structure of carbon. She returned to London in 1951 to work with a team of scientists at King’s College in the University of London. It was here that she began her groundbreaking investigations of DNA’s structure. Using a technique she invented, Franklin photographed the DNA molecule and the results clearly showed DNA’s helical structure. At the time, no one else had been able to produce such photographs. In addition, Franklin identified the location of phosphate sugars in DNA.
One of Franklin’s colleagues at King’s College, Maurice Wilkins, did not get along well with Franklin. This may have influenced Wilkin’s decision to share some of Franklin’s work (without her permission) with Watson and Crick of the University of Cambridge in January 1953. A few months later, when the science journal Nature published Watson and Crick’s paper on the structure of DNA, Franklin was apparently unaware that they had used her research. Both she and Wilkins published companion pieces on DNA in that same issue of Nature. Franklin eventually published five additional articles related to the prize-winning work.
In the spring of 1953, Franklin affiliated herself with Birbeck College, the graduate night school of the University of London. She continued to study DNA’s structure, as well as the structure of coal, but her focus was on plant viruses, in particular the tobacco mosaic virus.
In the last years of her life, Franklin studied the structure of the live poliovirus, despite the risk of contracting polio. After her death from ovarian cancer, work on live poliovirus was halted because of the high risk of contracting the disease.
